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Repository on windows share drive

Asked by Алексей Лебедев

I've got the follwing situation. There is a network drive located on the server and accessed as a windows share folder. I haven't got access to the server itself. The folder contains mainly excel files. About 5 users are working with these files, and each file can be accessed for writing by one user at any moment. Local machines of these users are Win7 machines. The thing I want to do is to add versioning control for these files.

My idea is to create a bazaar repository located on the shared folder, with users commiting to that repository from their local machines. I don't want to store a local copy of repository on every local machine for many non-computer reasons. For my task, I don't need branching or merging, each user will only do commits. Please tell me, is the scheme I described safe? May there be any problems when, for example, 2 users will make commits at the same time? Or maybe there is a better solution of my problem?

Would be very glad for any advice or comments.

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John A Meinel (jameinel) said : 		#1

bzr uses filesystem locks that should be safe on a shared network drive. We create a directory and rename it into place, which should only ever have 1 person 'succeed'. We also always read back to check that it was us that successfully took the lock.

The only problem we've seen on network filesystems is the rename succeeding, but the read back failing. (Something about eventual consistency, where we've done "rename a => b" and we get success, but when we try to read b it says it isn't there.)

I think if you experience it, it happens regularly, but most people never experience it. I haven't been able to reproduce it, myself. But there is an open bug about a quick try-again in the lock code (if read back fails, wait 2s, read again, before considering the lock to really not be held.)

Short answer, it should work fine, if it doesn't it probably is that bzr is being over cautious, rather that bzr would lose your data.

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Алексей Лебедев (alleb-p) said : 		#2

Thanks a lot for detailed answer! Pitily, I've got exactly the problem you mentioned - error reading the renamed folder when locking.
Btw, did I get you right - such problems can't cause any damage to the repository, it's just the failure of commit?

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John A Meinel (jameinel) said : 		#3

Right. The commit did not go through because we failed to take the lock.

John
=:->
On Apr 29, 2013 2:01 PM, "Алексей Лебедев" <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Question #227688 on Bazaar changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/227688
>
> Алексей Лебедев posted a new comment:
> Thanks a lot for detailed answer! Pitily, I've got exactly the problem you
> mentioned - error reading the renamed folder when locking.
> Btw, did I get you right - such problems can't cause any damage to the
> repository, it's just the failure of commit?
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Bazaar.
>

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