Hmm. I just tested it myself, and it worked fine for me to just update
another machine by pulling from git.kernel.org.
What version of git do you have? One thing that changed recently is that
at least some kernel.org git binaries got updated to 1.6.0, and if you
have a really ancient version of git (Debian 'stable' aka 'rubbish' ships
with something two years old), you'd better upgrade.
From the 1.6.0 announcement:
GIT v1.6.0 Release Notes
========================
User visible changes
--------------------
With the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now
installed outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk" and
some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical
reasons. Invoking a git subcommand as "git-xyzzy" from the command
line has been deprecated since early 2006 (and officially announced in
1.5.4 release notes); use of them from your scripts after adding
output from "git --exec-path" to the $PATH is still supported in this
release, but users are again strongly encouraged to adjust their
scripts to use "git xyzzy" form, as we will stop installing
"git-xyzzy" hardlinks for built-in commands in later releases.
An earlier change to page "git status" output was overwhelmingly unpopular
and has been reverted.
Source changes needed for porting to MinGW environment are now all in the
main git.git codebase.
By default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that
allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking,
introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5. If you want to keep your repositories
backwards compatible past these versions, set repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
to false or pack.indexVersion to 1, respectively.
and no, I am not at all interested in helping Debian continue to ship
git versions almost two years old, and much inferior to modern versions.
So I'm not ...
