[Gnu-arch-users] Re: patch: automatic remove the corrupt revlib revision

[Matthieu Moy]

Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> In some situations, a corrupt revision library is a serious clue to a 
> larger problem:  perhaps a disk has gone south in some unexpected way;
> perhaps an intrusion has taken place.  In these cases, the bogus revlib
> revision is a forensic clue and automagically removing it amounts to
> "collusion to destroy evidence".

There's at least one case where revlibs inode signature occur:
backup/restore. In this case, tla and baz will consider your revlib
(and your pristine trees as well) as corrupted, and will roughly cease
to work untill you manually "rm -fr" this revision.

I have a cron job using tla running on the SourceForge compilation
farm. This cron job breaks each time there is an important upgrade of
the servers (and since their email notification seems broken, it's a
silent failure for me).

I didn't find a satisfying solution to this problem, but at least in
my precise case, automatically removing the revlib entries for which
inode signature fails would have been a solution (a better solution
for this would have been a second signature, based on a hash, that
would survive backup/restore and rebuild the inode signature on
demand).

> I think you are are dangerously close to the trap that a certain subset
> of Canonical's awful hacking fell into:  

When will you stop talking about Canonical each time you feel
something is wrong?

-- 
Matthieu