Project page should load even if there's a problem loading repository information
Zendesk: https://gitlab.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/79020
We had a GitLab.com user that created a project by importing from GitHub, renamed the project, and then tried to re-create a blank project under the original name. Some race condition in the rename caused the repository content cache to be stale (positive). After creating the project again, the project page fails to load properly. It sees that the repository cache says there should be repository data and it tries to load things like the latest commit, which fails.
The actual problem occurs in ExtractsPath#assign_ref_vars
. Loading the repo data caused an exception which is rescued and a 404 is returned. Once we expired the content cache on the repository, the project page loaded fine.
Since GitLab projects contain so much more than just repository data, we should avoid blowing up due to an inconsistent state in the repository.