Re: cygwin 1.7.15: svn disk I/O error

[Warren Young <warren@etr-usa.com>]

On 6/19/2012 3:18 PM, Achim Gratz wrote:
>
> I suspect that svn
> does not deal with the file being locked exclusively (when TortoiseSVN
> accesses the database) and some call through the windows interface
> blocked.

It's possible svn has a timer on the call that results in a SQL call 
through SQLite, and when this doesn't return as fast as svn thinks it 
ought to, it bombs out, complaining that there "must" be a disk I/O 
problem.  What may actually be happening is that Windows' aggressive 
locking strategy has set up a deadlock between two processes.

As for why .3 and .12 behave differently, it's probably because one or 
more locks that used to be owned by the SQLite DLL that are now owned by 
the Cygwin DLL.  That is, files are being accessed on the DLL's behalf 
by Cygwin now, rather than directly through the Windows API.  Since 
Cygwin doubtless does file I/O differently than SQLite did, for the same 
basic reason that any two programmers tend to write code differently, 
there's a new conflict.

If this is the case, the best solution may be for TortoiseSVN to stop 
grabbing files for long-term exclusive use.  It should only be locking 
the svn DB files as long as is necessary to make some change.

> Note that SQLite isn't really designed for concurrent access
> to the database file from a different process.

There is a paucity of truth in that statement.  See the SQLite FAQ:

	https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

But, there's only so much SQLite can do to cooperate with the OS's 
locking strategy.  On POSIX systems where SQLite was born, locking is 
mostly advisory and cooperative, whereas Windows gives you mandatory 
locks by default in a lot of cases.  Mandatory locks allow one process 
(e.g. TortoiseSVN) to deny another (e.g. Cygwin svn) the ability to 
change a file, indefinitely.

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