Check Notes
===========

.. contents:: :local:

Overview
--------

Check has multiple responsibilities:

* Ensure that the data as recorded on disk is accessible intact and unaltered.
* Ensure that a branch/repository/tree/whatever is ready for upgrade.
* Look for and report on recorded-data issues where previous bzr's, or changing
  situations have lead so some form of inconsistency.
* Report sufficient information for a user to either fix the issue themselves
  or report a bug that will hopefully be sufficiently detailed we can fix based
  on the initial report.
* Not scare users when run if everything is okey-dokey.

Ideally one check invocation can do all these things.

Repository
----------

Things that can go wrong:
* Bit errors or alterations may occur in raw data.
* Data that is referenced may be missing
* There could be a lot of garbage in upload etc.
* File graphs may be inconsistent with inventories and parents.
* The revision graph cache can be inconsistent with the revision data.

Branch
------

Things that can go wrong:
* Tag or tip revision ids may be missing from the repo.
* The revno tip cache may be wrong.
* Various URLS could be problematic (not inaccessible, just invalid)
* Stacked-on branch could be inaccessible.

Tree
----

Things that can go wrong:
* Bit errors in dirstate.
* Corrupt or invalid shelves.
* Corrupt dirstates written to disk.
* Cached inventories might not match repository.

Duplicate work
--------------

If we check every branch in a repo separately we will encounter duplicate
effort in assessing things like missing tags/tips, revno cache etc.

Outline of approach
-------------------

To check a repository, we scan for branches, open their trees and generate
summary data. We then collect all the summary data in as compact a form as
possible and do a detailed check on the repository, calling back out to branch
and trees as we encounter the actual data that that tree/branch requires to
perform its check.
