pack format dogfooding - action required - was Re: Problems with bzr.dev tonight

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Tue Oct 16 07:35:54 BST 2007


If you haven't been helping test the new pack repository format, you
can ignore this message.  If you've only been running bzr.dev or
releases, you can ignore this message -- the packs format is not in
mainline yet, and this problem doesn't affect bzr.dev or any user
branches created using it.  (Despite the original thread title.)

Robert made a change to the new experimental packs on 2 Oct to make
file content within them annotated by default.  He sent mail at the
time describing an update procedure by which you had to at the right
time get a new copy of the code and upgrade your repository.  However,
there was no format marker change to ensure that you did the right
thing - things would seem to work, but pulling from a packs repository
into a knit repository would copy incorrect data.  (If you did a pull
before reading Robert's mail, you may have this problem.)  The most
obvious symptom is the message about "bzr: ERROR:
exceptions.ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack", and bzr
check will also detect a problem.

This should only be a problem for revision information pulled in from
pack branches, or possibly for new revisions created on that basis.
Based on the analysis of the problem I'm confident that other
information in an affected repository will be unaffected.

Because only a handful of people are likely to be affected by this,
and not on revisions they originated, I'm going to skip making an
automatic fix and suggest migrating to a new unaffected repository
instead.

Basically what you should do is:

 make a backup :-)
 move your bzr repository away
 make a new bzr repository
 branch across any branches of your own that you want to keep

if you have any questions just ask here or on irc.

-- 
Martin



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