fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Gitorious is getting a bit grumpy at clones and fetches lately, especially with big repositories such as WebKit.

A workaround, as suggested by Simon and the Gitorious support, is simply to use the SSH protocol instead of the Git protocol, even for read-only access to repositories. This requires to have a Gitorious account setup, which most of us should have already.

You can edit your .git/config file to achieve that by changing the line

url = git://gitorious.org/webkit/webkit.git

to

url = git@gitorious.org:webkit/webkit.git

Do the same for the QtWebKit team repository:

url = git@gitorious.org:+qtwebkit-developers/webkit/qtwebkit.git

Gitorious are reporting having difficulties to handle all the traffic they currently have, I guess this may affect the stability of the daemon serving the git:// protocol, who knows.