Bazaar Won't Commit or Update

[Martin Pool]

On 28 September 2011 23:05, Wichmann, Mats D <mats.d.wichmann at intel.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:21 AM, A. S. Budden <abudden at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > If you are missing one, you can just "mkdir obsolete_packs/" and
>> > "mkdir upload/", and probably the same for lock/. For the others, if
>> > they are missing, you've lost critical data.
>>
>> As you correctly surmised, it was the upload directory that was
>> missing: creating this directory fixed the problem.  All of the rest
>> of the entries (except no-working-trees and shared-storage) were
>> present.
>>
>> > I would also recommend trying to investigate why an empty directory
>> > might be being deleted by your OS/whatever. Otherwise this will just
>> > happen again.
>>
>> Indeed: this does concern me slightly, but I don't know that it's
>> going to be straightforward to work out how it happened...
>>
>
>
> Is there a way to diagnose this sort of problem a little more cleanly than
> fishing for advice on the mailing list?  I remember now I fell into this
> trap once
> a long while ago; I had a bunch of branches sitting on a storage-limited
> device (in fact, a virtual machine where "disk" was preallocated and I
> hadn't anticipated how I'd use it).  I figured one way to save space was
> to remove the obsolete_packs, which after all were just a backup in
> case the pack operation failed (Is that right?).  I guess I assumed the
> directory would just be recreated on need and so its absence would be
> no problem, but indeed I broke the branches instead... all my fault,
> but bzr's reporting was "not useful" either nor do I understand why that
> particular situation needs to be a fatal error.
> (now of course I know to only remove the /contents/ of obsolete_packs
> if I have this need)
> -- mats

For "how to diagnose", something like running 'bzr push
log+sftp://whatever' will write into ~/.bzr.log all the file
operations, which might give you a clue.

There is no good reason why it needs to be a fatal error - there is a
bug open saying bzr ought to catch the 'no such file', guess the
directory might be missing and if so recreate it.  It should be
reasonably straightforward - if someone wants to have a go we'll help
you get it in <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/270405>.

m