[darcs-users] Re: [issue] Permission error leaves corrupt repo, and darcs repair doesn't

[Simon Marlow]

Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
>>We didn't have permissions properly set up in the repository, so at
>>some point a 'darcs apply' failed due to a permission problem.
> 
> 
> Simon,
> 
> What was the permissions problem exactly?  (I suspect the working dir
> was read-only and _darcs was read-write, but I'd like you to confirm that.)

Sorry, I don't recall precisely what the permission problem with the 
commit was.  I can give you some background though: the tree is 
multi-user, with all users in the same group.  One problem was that we 
didn't have g+s set on the directories, so an apply by one user could 
leave files in the working (and pristine?) tree that weren't writable by 
other users.  Also its possible that some patches were applied with a 
umask of 022.

I suggest you try making some of these directories read-only, and see 
what happens when you try to apply a patch:

   - _darcs/patches
   - _darcs/inventories
   - _darcs/current
   - the working tree

>>The second part of the bug report is this: after doing 'darcs repair'
>>I was left with a repository with the 'Yikes, pending has conflicts!"
>>message.
> 
> 
> Yes, I can see how that can happen.  It's not clear to me whether it's
> better for ``darcs repair'' to remove a possibly corrupt
> _darcs/pending, or to discard a possibly useable _darcs/pending.
> 
> I guess a satisfactory workaround would be to improve the error message.

I don't know what _darcs/pending is for, so I can't help you there :) 
The wiki does say that the "Yikes" error message indicates a bug in darcs:

http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/DiagnosticMessages#head-9c51648634ece48d1570d406c2391ea54ca148c8

so I guess the error message should indicate that.

Cheers,
	Simon