[Xapian-discuss] Flint Database 'Can't acquire write lock'?

Richard Boulton richard at lemurconsulting.com
Fri Apr 20 14:09:43 BST 2007


Olly Betts wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 06:37:47PM +0900, Josef Novak wrote:
>> I'm using xapian-core-0.9.9, built on a 64bit linux machine
>> (Linux 2.4.21-143-smp x86_64 unknown ), employing a bash shell.
> 
> Flint relies on fcntl() for locking, so perhaps the filing system
> you have the database on doesn't support this.  What is the filing
> system?  If it's NFS, make sure you're running 'lockd'.
> 
> Quartz uses completely different locking technique which works on
> NFS without lockd, but it leaves a stale lock behind if the process
> exits unexpectedly, which is annoying.
> 
> If it's not obviously the FS, can you try a snapshot tarball of SVN
> HEAD?  There are have been some minor tweaks to the locking code:

Having taken a quick peek at the code, there are quite a few different 
ways it can fail - it would be nice to report which of these happened to 
the user, somehow (presumably in the form of different messages in the 
exception raised).  This would require the Lock object to return that 
information to the place that the exception is raised (or to move the 
raising of the exception into the Lock object).

I've filed a wishlist bug on this: bug #136.

-- 
Richard



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