How to recover from this permanent fatal error?

[David Bremner]

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras at gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I can't use notmuch anymore, I get this error:
>
> A Xapian exception occurred opening database: The revision being read
> has been discarded - you should call Xapian::Database::reopen() and
> retry the operation
>
> Context. In order to investigate a bug about mbsync I moved away the
> folder ~/mail/.notmuch. I have a timer that calls notmuch new after
> mbsync, so I paused that timer.
>
> Initially I used notmuch, only to see everything empty. Then I
> recalled what I did, removed all the files, and moved back the .nomuch
> directory.
>
> IIRC I was able to use notmuch without problems once, and then I got the issue.

Maybe the Xapian folk will have a more concrete suggestion, but I would
start by running xapian-check on the database. In your case I guess that
should be "xapian-check ~/mail/.notmuch".

You might have to install an extra package to get xapian-check. On
Debian it's part of xapian-tools.

d