Hello, fellow fossilers, A few minutes ago i made a horrible mistake in a fossil repo and felt compelled to post a minor warning/gotcha for other developers out there. The solution to the mistake also points out a nice side-effect of the single-file _FOSSIL_ metadata approach (as opposed to using subdirs for repo metadata).
(To be clear, the problem here was all my fault, not fossil's.) i was doing some "old-school-style" refactoring, something like: ~> perl -i -pe 's|WHIO_ENABLE_ZLIB|WHIO_CONFIG_ENABLE_ZLIB|g' $(find . -type f | xargs grep -l WHIO_ENABLE_ZLIB) In english: that replaces WHIO_ENABLE_ZLIB which WHIO_CONFIG_ENABLE_ZLIB in all files under the current dir (including subdirs). After doing so i wanted to see what files had been modified: ~> fossil status fossil: not within an open checkout Doh! After a moment it was clear what i had done - a text replace in _FOSSIL_, which of course corrupted it. For a fossil repo, there is a trivial workaround: ~> mkdir foo ~> cd foo ~> fossil open /path/to/original.fossil ~> mv _FOSSIL_ .. ~> cd .. ~> rm -fr foo (By sheer cosmic coincidence, i didn't even lose my un-pushed wiki changes because i had exported them beforehand so that the wiki would be included in the search/replace operation.) On a Subversion repo, or most other system where SCM metadata is stored in multiple subdirectories, this recovery would have been a lot more difficult (and would have required online access to the repo). (Yeah, i've also screwed up such repos via this same mistake before.) So the lessons are: a) Don't screw up your _FOSSIL_ file. This is a no-brainer, obviously, but sometimes we act as if we have no brains and we do something like i demonstrated at the top of this post. b) If you do screw up _FOSSIL_, recovery is trivial. At most you'll lose any un-pushed wiki/ticket/etc changes. Happy fossiling! -- ----- stephan beal http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/
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