Re: Lack of Subversion repository recovery tools

The point really is that it's always possible there are bugs in any given
release that might produce corruption - whether it's currently affected one
user or one thousand.

The releases are tested and that's great but when the times comes to say
"whoops we missed a bug" it's not acceptable to say to users with assets
bound up in a repository "never mind that bugs gone now".

It seems a couple of tools might be needed.

1. Cheap verification. Most likely achieved by supporting verify revision
ranges so that recent revs can be verified to detect errors earlier. This
sounds like it's on the way.

2. Repo scraper. A dump option that dumps revisions while they good, skips
revisions when they're bad and keeps content in subsequent good revisions
that is recoverable - eg skips rather than diffs. Let users know revision
timestamp info to suggest that some or all data newer than these times is
missing.

Cheap verification dramatically reduces the urgency of providing what could
be a fairly complex recovery tool.

If repo content can be verified more often then users will get more
opportunity to use their backups productively.

--
Talden
On 7/5/07, Toby Thain <toby@smartgames.ca> wrote:
>
>
> On 4-Jul-07, at 2:06 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> > Melikian, Chris wrote:
> >> That is a 100% correct description of my gripe. I'm stuck with a
> >> repository I can't dump because a revision is corrupt and can't be
> >> fixed
> >> with fsfsverify, a 3rd party tool with no support (officially but
> >> John
> >> has been very helpful!).
> >> I'm seriously doubting the production readiness of subversion with
> >> fsfs.
> >> I'm going to look into subversion with bdb but I'm facing increasing
> >> pressure to move to ClearCase which I am very loathed to do. I can't
> >> defend subversion/fsfs as it stands.
> >
> > Do you happen to know why you have a corrupt revision?  If it is a
> > hardware problem or underlying filesystem issue there's not much
> > reason to think that any other software would handle it any better.
>
> Exactly.
>
> David is one of the few who seems to have experienced a real-life
> corruption, was that definitely due to a software bug? Or is nobody
> sure?
>
> --Toby
>
> >
> > --
> >   Les Mikesell
> >    lesmikesell@gmail.com
> >
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