Hello,
first, I felt very comfortable with git-annex, but now I run into problems more often, and I think they are related to the WORM backend. I use this backend for my photos, since they are big (25MB) and never modified (camera raws, I don't touch them). So I edited my .gitattributes to use WORM.
The problems usually are as follows: I perform an operation, and git (I think it is git which has the problems), and the process exits with exit code 1 and tells me "cannot open binary file: File name too long". The same happens from time to time when I have filenames containing special characters such as ', which can happen when I tag my music collection. I suspect the WORM backend to cause the problems, since the file names in .git/annex are indeed very long and ugly beccause of all the escaping done here.
I am sorry that I cannot give a recipe how to reproduce this behaviour, and sometimes it helps to enter a subdirectory and perform the operation from there, for example:
$ git annex copy --to dest Pictures fails, but $ cd Pictures/dir_with_problematic_file; git annex copy --to dest . works.
Is there some advice or did anyone here observe similar behaviour?
Best regards, Philipp
Please show
ls -loutput listing one or more of the files with the problem. Also I'd need to know the filesystem your repository is using in order to reproduce the problem.Note that you can use
git annex migrateto switch away from the WORM backend..I refreshed my memory and did some testing, and the WORM backend deals with extremely large filenames by detecting the filename length limitations of the filesystem where the repository is located, and if a WORM key is longer than the maximum filename length, it will truncate it down to fit.
This avoids any problems in my testing, as long as the WORM keys are being generated and used all on filesystems with similar filename length limits. If you are using a version of git-annex older than 4.20131024, it won't do that, and you should upgrade.
If you are using a mixture of filesystems, eg EXT4 and VFAT, this can still result in WORM key names generated on EXT4 being too long to fit on the VFAT filesystem. In this case, I would recommend not using WORM.
Incidentially, that version also made many problematic characters not be included in WORM key names, so they're more portable to eg, FAT filesystems.