Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:49:22 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Patrick Totzke <patricktotzke@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: notmuch python bindings corrupt db index (was: gmail importer
	script)
Message-ID: <20121212204922.GB6187@mit.edu>
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	<20121211182638.27237.98903@brick.lan>
	<CAHmME9qafP5He4hYPEAyrtS4hq3CRNKBQfvxvP=r4L6uDeqt1w@mail.gmail.com>
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Cc: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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Quoth Jason A. Donenfeld on Dec 12 at  7:35 pm:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Patrick Totzke <patricktotzke@gmail.com> wrote:
> > i am kind of reluctant to reproduce this again (on my work-desktop).
> 
> It'd really be a huge help if you could backup and try...
> 
> > All i did was start your script, writing to the index in another terminal in between (using alot)
> > possibly my cronjob fired a "notmuch new; afew.." in between also.
> > when I killed your script the index war broken.
> >
> > Can i turn on some global logging for notmuch to debug this?
> > Maybe libnotmuch had trouble with so many db-writes at a time?
> 
> That is very wrong and bizarre. I open the database in read/write
> mode, which is supposed to lock other programs from accessing it in
> this way... Very strange.

There should be no way to corrupt the database at this level through
the Xapian API, which means nothing libnotmuch can do (much less users
of libnotmuch) should be able to corrupt the database.  If you can
reproduce the problem, it's probably a serious bug in Xapian, but it
could also have been a file system bug or even random file system
corruption.