Git annex possible bug

Git annex possible bug

[Robert Cathles]

We use git annex and found an issue where one machine that had run
'git annex sync' and 'git annex sync --content' was not reporting any
issues, but any other machines were report 99 issues when running 'git
annex get'.

The message for each file was that it was not known to exist on any
repo. doing some searching I found 'git annex fsck' so ran that in the
following fashion on the 'broken' machines: 'git annex fsck
--from=LocalMirrorName --fast'. During this we saw git was updating
the location log for nearly all the missing files. Running 'git annex
get' afterwards resolved the issue and got the files. We found we had
to repeat this on all affected machines.

The machine that did the original sync was running git 2.7.4 and other
machines were either running the same, or 2.17.1.

A test I also tried: I copied one annex file from inside the .git
folder of the original machine that ran the sync, and added it to the
same location on a broken machine, then ran sync and get, and it
reported 98 issues instead.

Does this seem like a bug with git annex? Is there a possible gap in
the way that git annex reports that all is fine - perhaps to do with
the index? Or does this seem to be more likely an issue we created
ourselves? Would there have been any other commands we could have run
to resolve this issue or should have tried out first? (Apart from just
deleting each of our clones and starting again)

Robert

Re: Git annex possible bug

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Thu, Jan 31 2019, Robert Cathles wrote:

> We use git annex and found an issue where one machine that had run
> 'git annex sync' and 'git annex sync --content' was not reporting any
> issues, but any other machines were report 99 issues when running 'git
> annex get'.
>
> The message for each file was that it was not known to exist on any
> repo. doing some searching I found 'git annex fsck' so ran that in the
> following fashion on the 'broken' machines: 'git annex fsck
> --from=LocalMirrorName --fast'. During this we saw git was updating
> the location log for nearly all the missing files. Running 'git annex
> get' afterwards resolved the issue and got the files. We found we had
> to repeat this on all affected machines.
>
> The machine that did the original sync was running git 2.7.4 and other
> machines were either running the same, or 2.17.1.
>
> A test I also tried: I copied one annex file from inside the .git
> folder of the original machine that ran the sync, and added it to the
> same location on a broken machine, then ran sync and get, and it
> reported 98 issues instead.
>
> Does this seem like a bug with git annex? Is there a possible gap in
> the way that git annex reports that all is fine - perhaps to do with
> the index? Or does this seem to be more likely an issue we created
> ourselves? Would there have been any other commands we could have run
> to resolve this issue or should have tried out first? (Apart from just
> deleting each of our clones and starting again)

This may be a bug in git-annex, or not, but in any case you've reached
the wrong people to ask. The git-annex tool is not part of git itself,
it's a third-party plugin.

You'll probably want to file a bug here:
https://git-annex.branchable.com/bugs/