Re: [Gnu-arch-users] catastrophic deletion

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 16:45:32 -0700, Ron Gorodetzky wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've run into a little problem.  I've been using arch for several small
> projects for the past several months.  I've had a couple central
> archives in which I set up a project and a few local archives in which I
> would do my work which I would later merge into the main archives.
> 
> Unfortunately a harddrive crash killed my main archives and it seems as
> though I never made a backup of them  (I think I've learned this lesson
> the hard way too many times).  However, I do have a working copy of
> every project in those main archives.  I kept them around for merging
> purposes.  I also have my personal archives that have tagged projects
> from the main archives.  
> 
> So now I have two questions.  
> 
> 1. Is there a way to restore the archive from the data I do have?

There is a way to recover from a fully populated revision library
(because it just has everything, only in different format). There is no
way of fully restoring from just working directories, since they don't
contain the diffs to previous versions.

I'd suggest that your new main archive is called the same, categories
and branches are the same and just the versions increase. It will not be
the same from arch's prespective (so it won't try to access non-existing
paches) and you'll know which is which.

> 2. What should I do about my branches?  Their ancestor doesn't exist
> anymore.  Is there a way to make the merging work with a different main
> archive?  Should I now never create a main archive with the same name as
> the original that I lost?  Are there other issues that I may have missed
> with changing the past so dramatically?

You'll have to replay the changes, that are not merged in the working
trees, because the common ancestor is lost. Then, when you import the
working tree as a new version (do NOT delete the {arch} stuff, just
set-default-version and import), you'll just sync-tree on the branches
and from that point, mergeing will work again.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>

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