User friendliness wish list

[Kyle Markley]

Developers,

When tahoe deep-check --repair encounters a file it can't repair, it 
stops without reporting anything about what file gave it trouble.
What do I do about this?  I rerun, this time with -v, so I get a listing 
of what files it is working on.  From that list I can often infer which 
file had the error.  Assuming I still have the original file, the 
corrective action is to tahoe put the file.  Then I can restart the 
deep-check.
But in a directory tree with thousands of files, that takes forever!  
Instead, I can restart the deep-check in a subdirectory closer to the 
previous failure.  But this is a lot of tedious work.

I wish that tahoe deep-check would:

 1. Report which file is unrepairable.
 2. Not stop at the first error, but continue and report all errors upon
    completion.

When an unrepairable file is an immutable directory, what corrective 
action should be taken?  I have resorted to modifying the directory by 
creating an empty file, performing a tahoe backup, and then continuing 
the deep-check --repair.  But I cannot then remove the empty file, 
because that would cause the next backup to point to the original 
(unrepaired) directory.  Can this be improved?

I wish that tahoe backup could be combined with tahoe deep-check 
--repair.  The behavior would be like deep-check, but if any file is 
unrepairable yet exists in in the local filesystem at the corresponding 
path, upload it.  And for bonus points this should guarantee happiness, 
not just healthiness.  Or, it would be almost as good if deep-check 
would update the backup database so the next invocation of tahoe backup 
would re-upload the appropriate files and directories.

Essentially, I struggle with the fact that "tahoe backup" completes 
successfully without guaranteeing the recoverability of files it claims 
to have backed up.  The backup database is out-of-sync with the 
healthiness of files on the grid, and there is no way to bring them 
in-sync.  Sure, I can delete the backup database, but I don't want to 
pointlessly re-upload all the healthy files.

-- 
Kyle Markley