crash after running notmuch new

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Apr 07, 2020 at 05:21:47PM -0300, David Bremner wrote:
> Matt <mattator at gmail.com> writes:
[...]
> > termlist:
> > blocksize=8K items=186136 firstunused=62058 revision=421 levels=2 root=12260
> > B-tree checked okay
> > termlist table structure checked OK
> >
> > postlist:
> > blocksize=8K items=2598971 firstunused=61412 revision=421 levels=2 root=49814
> > xapian-check: DatabaseCorruptError: Db block overwritten - are there
> > multiple writers?
> > ===
> > suggests there is an error but I couldn't find a fix for it. Should I
> > just remove the xapian folder and rerun `notmuch new` ?
> 
> If you have a backup of your tags from notmuch-dump, then yes that's
> probably a good way forward.

If you don't have a current dump, you may be able to rescue a dump of
tags from a broken notmuch database using:

https://git.xapian.org/?p=xapian;a=blob;f=README.notmuch;hb=refs/heads/notmuch-tag-rescue-hack

That should work if the termlist table is undamaged (as the above
appears to show), and may work even if it's damaged.

> I've put the xapian developers in copy in
> case they are interested in trying to debug this corruption. For those
> just joining us, this is notmuch 0.29.3 linked against xapian 1.4.15

Was the database created with 1.4.15 too?

If it's reproducible, I'm definitely interested.

If it isn't reproducible (and/or the data is sensitive) it's much more
difficult to usefully investigate.  And it may also be due to a
non-Xapian issue (a bug in something else or a hardware problem).

Cheers,
    Olly