Git error: "badTimezone: invalid author/committer line - bad time zone"

You might get the above error message when cloning certain git repositories (for example the rails repository). It indicates that there is a malformed timestamp in some commit, and your git installation is configured to validate it.

As a workaround, you can disable the validation using

git config --global fetch.fsckobjects false

This settings seems to be the default for most git installations anyways.