Item1677: RCS may leave stale semaphone files after crash
Priority: Normal
Current State: Closed
Released In:
Target Release: n/a
Applies To: Engine
Component: RcsWrap
Branches:
Received the following error:
Error saving topic
During save of Web.Topic an error was found by the version control system. Please notify your administrator.
RCS: /usr/bin/rcs -l %FILENAME|F% failed:
Go back in your browser and save your changes locally.
Determined that the error notice was due to a orphaned semaphore file, as mentioned in the RCS man file as a "BUG":
A catastrophe (e.g. a system crash) can cause RCS to leave behind a
semaphore file that causes later invocations of RCS to claim that the
RCS file is in use. To fix this, remove the semaphore file. A
semaphore file's name typically begins with , or ends with _.
Indeed, I found that a semaphore file existed in the data folder for this web, and deleting it corrected the problem.
RcsWrap.pm should probably be enhanced to try to delete a left-over semaphore file since this is a known problem, or as a weaker alternative, add a more elaborate description to the error message to point out that deleting the semaphore file can correct the problem.
Will add an option to a utility program to scan data files and delete stale semaphores as an option.
Raymond hasn't produced this utility yet, and TBH I'm not sure of the value; it's easy enough to
find
such semaphore files and delete them manually.
I don't think a core code fix is appropriate here; this is a very rare error.Addressed by
Support.Faq28
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CrawfordCurrie - 25 Jun 2010