[Sugar-devel] Datastore index corruption!

[Gary Martin]

On 29 Jul 2010, at 00:21, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:

> (also filed as http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2132, but let's keep the
> discussion on the mailing-list, please).
> 
> Today we figured out one of the possibly many ways in which the index of
> the datastore can get corrupted in Sugar. 
> 
> Here's an almost infallible recipe to reproduce it:
> 
> 1. open Write
> 2. type something
> 3. close Write
> 4. wait a few seconds
> 5. kill -9 the datastore process
> 6. restart sugar (ctrl-alt-del)
> 
> Your saved entry is gone. It still takes up space on disk, but it's no
> longer visible until you rebuild the index.
> 
> Step 5 is just an artificial way to reproduce the problem. Other equally
> effective ways to trigger this data loss issue in the real-world include
> running out of battery, holding the power button for 4 seconds, and
> triggering the kernel out-of-memory killer.
> 
> I'm sure the datastore could definitely work harder to prevent this type
> of data loss, by flushing the index immediately after an activity
> creates a new entry.
> 
> Meanwhile, we're working on a work-around that will hopefully fix all
> problems of this sort: a "Rescan" or "Reindex" item on the Journal
> palette.

Unsurprisingly, a massive -1 from me, but you knew that was coming already! ;)

> I can already hear a big objection coming: this sort of geeky stuff has
> no place in the Sugar UI. True, but I see no alternative until we'll
> have a 100% reliable datastore that can fix itself in all cases of
> corruption.

Never going to happen, keep dreaming if you want, but it will only get better, never perfect. 

Regards,
--Gary 

> 
> -- 
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
> \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel