Re: corrupt bbdb database, & what to do abouti t?

[J. David Boyd]

Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 3:23 PM, J. David Boyd <david@adboyd.com> wrote:
>> Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> after two events in rapid succession -- a hard hang on emacs that
>>> required me to kill the process, and a minor upgrade of my system
>>> (running snapshot packages on ubuntu lucid), my bbdb database appears
>>> to be corrupt.  i'm just wondering what i ought to do about that, as i
>>> spent quite a while harvesting these addresses & don't want to lose
>>> them entirely.  here's my error message:
>>>
>>> ----------
>>> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "catastrophic: bbdb-records
>>> recursed")
>>>   signal(error ("catastrophic: bbdb-records recursed"))
>>>   error("catastrophic: bbdb-records recursed")
>>>   bbdb-records(nil t)
>>>   byte-code(" \203 !\210\303\304\305\"\210      \207" [w bbdb-hashtable
>>> select-window bbdb-records nil t] 3)
>>>   bbdb-complete-name()
>>>   call-interactively(bbdb-complete-name nil nil)
>>>   recursive-edit()
>>>   byte-code("\306       @\307=\203!
>>> debug(error (error "catastrophic: bbdb-records recursed"))
>>>   signal(error ("catastrophic: bbdb-records recursed"))
>>>   error("catastrophic: bbdb-records recursed")
>>>   bbdb-records(t)
>>>   bbdb-search-simple(nil "jasonbrown591@rogers.com")
>>> --------
>>> has anyone ever seen this before?  i'm guessing my bbdb db is corrupt
>>> but i'd rather not build it back from scratch, so if anyone has any
>>> advice it'd be really helpful.  thanks much,
>>> matt
>>
>>
>> It's just text...  Peruse it, and see if anything looks funny.  If it
>> does, fix it.  (Save a backup first, of course!)
>>
> well, that worked.  in fact i just looked at the old backup, saw there
> was only one line different, and deleted it.  it's still not obvious
> to me why there should be a problem, though.  here's the diff:
>
> ~$ diff .backup/\!home\!matt\!.emacs.d\!bbdb.~16~ .emacs.d/bbdb
> 225a226
>> ["OLPC Community" "Support" nil nil nil nil 
>> ("community-support@lists.laptop.org") ((creation-date . "2010-04-26") 
>> (timestamp . "2010-04-26")) nil]
>
> I guess there must be something wrong with that reford but I can't
> tell just looking at it.  anyway thanks for the help!
>
> matt
>


I couldn't tell you either, but I've done the same thing in the past.
Look for what is weirdly different, and change it to match the rest.

Glad it all worked out for you!

Dave