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Improved Git error message for broken repositories

At GitHub, we store multiple copies of every Git repository our customers push up. Every once in a while, one copy of a Git repository can wind up in a broken state. Usually, our maintenance processes fix the copy automatically, and no one ever notices the problem. Under very rare circumstances, the automation is unable to fix the problem, requiring manual intervention. To prevent further damage from accruing, the automation marks the repository "broken" and doesn't allow further changes (pushes or maintenance).

The GitHub web interface has long shown an informative message informing viewers that the repository is broken. With this change, the Git client will also receive a similar message. Previously, Git would report an unactionable, confusing, and very low-level error such as "fatal: bad tree object 3c8f2e6c8252929ce8334d52bd33b2bc358e7e4c".

Today, we're launching public beta support for Bitbucket Server and Bitbucket Data Center migrations in GitHub Enterprise Importer.

You can now easily use GitHub Enterprise Importer to migrate your source code, revision history, pull requests, reviews and comments when moving to GitHub from your self-hosted Bitbucket instance.

For a step-by-step guide on migrating from Bitbucket Server or Bitbucket Data Center, check out "Migrating repositories from Bitbucket Server to GitHub Enterprise Cloud" in the GitHub Docs.

We'd love to hear your feedback and questions; join us in the Community Discussion!

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Node12 has been out of support since April 2022. As a result we started the deprecation process of Node12 for GitHub Actions by migrating all actions to run on Node16 on June 14th.
We have seen no major issues reported and a minimal number of people opted out of the forced upgrade to Node16. Given this, we will remove Node12 from the Actions runner on the 14th of August 2023.

What you need to do

For Actions maintainers: Update your actions to run on Node16 instead of Node12 (Actions configuration settings)
For Actions users: Update your workflows with latest versions of the actions which runs on Node16 (Using versions for Actions)

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