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wc-ng and recoverability of corrupt wc's

From: Johan Corveleyn <jcorvel_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 11:03:21 +0200

Hi,

Sometimes, a (part of a) working copy gets corrupted (errors like
'checksum mismatch ...' while running 'update'). Maybe it happened
because a third-party tool has messed with the base files, or with the
entries file, or ... or maybe it happened because of a bug in svn.
This was/is deemed non-disastrous, because it's only a working copy,
one can always checkout a new one (after backing up local changes).

Of course, it can be painful if a working copy is (very) large, and
the corruption is in a small directory somewhere deep down, ... In
wc-1, there was the cheap solution that you could just blast away the
"corrupt directory" (including the .svn metadata), and let "svn
update" restore it (after which you would copy over your modified
files). Just this week I helped out two of my colleagues who ran into
such wc corruptions, by following exactly this procedure.

AFAICS, this will no longer be possible with wc-ng. Has anyone thought
about this problem? Any ideas on how one could recover "cheaply" from
a small (local to a single directory or file) corruption in the wc
(either incorrect meta-data, or corrupt pristine, or ...)?

Maybe the "increased recovery cost" will be partly offset by wc-ng
having less chance of becoming corrupt? Because of more robustness,
and because of decreased likelyhood of corrupting pristine files
because they are only in the wc-root, and things like that? I don't
know ...

In any case, I expect questions about "how to recover from wc
corruption" to appear on the users list pretty quickly, so it would be
useful if some strategies could already be devised ...

Cheers,

-- 
Johan
Received on 2011-07-01 15:08:26 CEST

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