Subject: Re: Git annex possible bug

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 23:40:21 +0100

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/