Re: [Monotone-devel] [FreeBSD Wiki] new requiremnent: "VCSDatabaseRecovery"

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Lapo" == Lapo Luchini <address@hidden> writes:

    Lapo> Monotone authors are quite paranoid regarding correctness of
    Lapo> the storage, and never in the (recent?) past a bug managed
    Lapo> to actually delete important information. When in the (far?) 
    Lapo> past users had a database form some reason unusable (at the
    Lapo> very least, there's disk corruption) they went so far as
    Lapo> releasing a specific version for the recovery of that
    Lapo> specific database.  The database itself is SQLite, so
    Lapo> everyone can easily see its content and be assured about its
    Lapo> soundness.

Still, it is not possible to recover from any corruption of any
kind. This isn't monotone's fault - it just isn't possible. Think hard
disk errors, filesystems corruption, unclean shutdowns (unless
filesystem journals data entries), intruders, etc.

The criteria needs to be narrowed down to say just what type of
corruption they are talking about.

Personally, my criteria would be "must not use allow you to use
corrupt data and pretend nothing has happened" and "must be easy to
make backups". I think monotone passes both of these.

My only complaint with the robustness of monotone is doing an update
operation that tries to delete a directory that contains unknown files
(this has caught me be surprise on several occasions now, the second
time being when I tried to go back to an early version before the
directory was created). It can be very messy resolving such issues. I
end up having to do a complete revert of the entire working directory
and delete the temp directory (plus possible some other magic I may
have forgotten now).
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>