RCS file corruption

Hi,

As an admin for a site running Foswiki I am getting a steady stream of rcs history

corruptions. I have some tools to help repair the histories but in some cases no

scripted repair is currently possible. The various problems include:

1/ appends contain too much text or too little text ie when we have

something like

a10 2

we might have three lines of text or one rather than 2.

2/ appends try to add lines beyond the end of the file

3/ deletes try to delete lines beyond the end of the file

4/ 'backward' deletion where we are trying to go backwards

and delete lines starting at line less than 'n' even though

last append/delete concerned line 'n'

a22 2

This

text

d20 1 <- backward deletion

The errors from rcs are things like

'edit beyond end of file'

'bad diff output'

Has anyone seen this before? It's now affecting several hundred

files and I'd like to understand whether there is a way to at least stop

the problem occurring for new files.

Thanks.

That sounds like a bug we had with RcsLite, which was fixed some time ago. Repairing broken files is tricky - I tried to write a script to do it, but failed. But files created with RcsLite since the bugfix (sorry, i forget when it was fixed) should not have the problem - or you have found a different bug.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 May 2010

Thanks for your reply. The fact that we're getting new file corruptions indicates to me that this is

an ongoing problem. I will check the history of files and compare with backups and

post some more information.

-- NeilMckett - 14 2010

Closing due to no fuirther info

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Sep 2011