[darcs-devel] [issue434] Darcs grief: Issue 274

[Kevin Quick]

Simon,

This sounds like a variation of the permissions issue I wrote about
recently.  I'll be departing in a couple of days for a 2 wk vacation,
but I am in agreement on this issue and am willing to work with
folks to help resolve this upon my return.

I am a bit concerned that it was a darcs pull that encountered this
problem for you.  In my case, it was a push from a user that didn't
have proper access rights to some of the files in my repo (and did on
others).  I wouldn't have expected this in the pull case, however.
Are you certain it was a pull, and in either case, have you been
able to reproduce it?

-KQ

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:34:51 +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones <bugs at darcs.net>
wrote:

>
> New submission from Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:
>
> David
>
> This message is about Issue 274, which I raised 6 months ago.
>
> Perhaps it wasn't clear enough from my initial report, but
>
>         this is a repository corruption error
>
> >From my point of view it's very, very serious: I cannot rely on Darcs not to arbitrarily corrupt my working tree, which embodies many, many hours of work.  This is, I think, the third time it has happened, and I am now going to have to spend an unhappy few hours unravelling which are my changes and which are changes from unrelated patches.  (Details below.)
>
> For a source-code control system I believe that fixing repo-corruption errors should be (and I believe is) the highest priority.  But nothing has happened, so far as I know.  I suspect that's because I wasn't clear enough before that it's a serious problem.  Hence this message.
>
> I know that you and the other Darcs developers have a zillion other things to do; and I know from my experience with GHC that you cannot satisfy everyone.   But I do think this one is worth some serious attention.  Please!
>
> Details below
>
> Thanks
>
> Simon
>
> =========================
>
> Here are the details
>
> It's pretty simple.
>
> * I have a Darcs tree.
>
> * I have made quite significant changes, but I have not yet recorded them.
>
> * I do a darcs pull -av (via a shell script called darcs-all), and I get
>
> darcs failed:  user error (Error applying patch to working dir:
> ./darcs-all-0: renameFile: permission denied (Permission denied))
> This may have left your working directory an inconsistent
> but recoverable state. If you had no un-recorded changes
> by using 'darcs revert' you should be able to make your
> working directory consistent again.
>
> * Now "darcs pull -av" says there are no patches to pull
>
> * But "darcs what -s" shows zillions of changes that I have not made.  They presumably came from patches that got put in my repository, but not applied to my working directory.
>
> The result is that my own changes (representing many hours of investment) are now in my working directory inextricably tangled up with all the changes that other people have made.
>
> I can't do 'darcs revert' because that would lose all my changes.
>
> I avoided doing an earlier 'darcs record' because that leads to conflicts, and conflicts cause Darcs to crash, so we go to great lengths to avoid them.
>
> [Simon M tells me that I should do the following
>         * Record my changes
>         * Pull stuff from the repo
>         * If there are conflicts, then unrecord my changes and
>                 do some other fixing up to avoid having a conflict
>                 in the HEAD
>
> I didn't do that.  But still the repo should not be corrupted.]
>
> ================
>
> My guess as to the problem. I *think* this might have happened because the 'pull' modifies the 'darcs-all' script, which is in the midst of being executed.  On Windows a shell-script file is locked during execution, so the 'pull' can't modify it.  That crashes the pull.
>
> But rather than fixing this (which may be Windows-specific) I submit that there should be some end-to-end guarantee that my repo will not be corrupted, regardless of what happens in the middle.
>
> ----------
> messages: 1588
> nosy: EricKow, beschmi, droundy, igloo, simonmar, simonpj, tommy
> status: unread
> title: Darcs grief: Issue 274
>
> ____________________________________
> Darcs issue tracker <bugs at darcs.net>
> <http://bugs.darcs.net/issue434>
> ____________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> darcs-devel mailing list
> darcs-devel at darcs.net
> http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel


--
--
Kevin Quick
quick at org after sparq
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