vi/fugitive: Gpush does not exit... sometimes

Question

I just started using fugitive in my workflow... very useful! But I've seem to have run into a weird annoyance that I'm hoping someone might have a solution to:

When I run :Gpush, sometimes control never returns to vi. Vi hangs on the output of git push until I Ctrl+C to kill "it". I've also tried installing vim-dispatch and, within tmux, the result is that the git push pane never closes. This is even more annoying because I've got to switch down to that pane to Ctrl+C it.

Oddly, if I ps, I do not see any git processes running, so I'm not sure what is hanging, exactly... but Ctrl+C does kill "it", whatever "it" is, and control returns to vi.

I've found a closed github issue that mentions similar behavior, but a solution was never posted... it appears the problem eventually just "went away" for the OP, so the issue was closed.

However, a second person replied to the issue some time later saying he was having a similar problem and it seemed to happen when git spawned some kind of "credential cache daemon". I'm not using a credential helper as he is, so that's not my exact issue... but that caused me to notice something else:

I have ssh configured to keep connections open for 5 minutes (ControlPersist 5m in my ~/.ssh/config). If I haven't pushed in a while, git push causes ssh to spawn a process to persist the connection. This triggers the issue. After 5 minutes, ssh exits, which will fix the problem and cause the tmux pane to close. If I do another push while the connection is still open, it works fine.

So, the problem seems to be when git spawns another process. This obviously doesn't cause any issues when I run git on the command-line, so why does it cause an issue here? And what can I do about it? I don't want to disable the ssh persistent connections because that's useful...

Answer 1

For anyone who stumbles upon this in the future, I've come up with a solution for my particular case where the ssh process is hanging vim: I disable the ControlPersist option, but only for git commands run inside vim via fugitive by setting the following option in my .vimrc:

let g:fugitive_git_executable = "env GIT_SSH_COMMAND='ssh -o ControlPersist=no' git"

It's ugly, and I'm sad that I have to disable the persistent connections, but it works.