Issues with "pub cache repair"

[DartBot]

<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1047298?v=3" align="left" width="96" height="96"hspace="10"> Issue by Scorpiion
Originally opened as dart-lang/sdk#21550

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In a thread on Google Plus there was a discussion of issues with "pub cache repair", this is an issue to track that discussion. Further discussion on the subject is better held here than on Google Plus.

Thread:
https://plus.google.com/113415344870093527255/posts/Tab8xQnqoFs

[DartBot]

<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/2156198?v=3" align="left" width="48" height="48"hspace="10"> Comment by kasperl

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cc @munificent.
Added Area-Pub, Triaged labels.

[DartBot]

<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/1937607?v=3" align="left" width="48" height="48"hspace="10"> Comment by denniskaselow

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I think my use case for needing to run "pub cache repair" is more of a non-issue that will go away once issue #727 is fixed, but I'll add some detail anyway.

Have two branches: one with the development version (e.g. the example webapp), one with the deployable version (everything that's in build/web after running 'pub build').

The development version has symlinks to the required packages, and the packages-dirs are in .gitignore
The deployable version has no symlinks, but a real packages-dir which is not ignored.

Switching from development to deployable the directories in packages remain symlinked, but will now contain what's checked into the deployable branch (e.g. the browser-package with dart.js). Switching back to the development version will now remove the browser-package/content and thus delete the content of the symlinked folder.
=> pub cache ruined for this dependency

By doing this step by step, documenting everything I was even able to ruin it even more, because windows locked the browser folder and pub cache repair failed on its first try and didn't seem to try again on later tries...

On the first try:
Failed to repair browser 0.10.0+2. Error:
Failed to delete entry because it was in use by another process.
This may be caused by a virus scanner or having a file
in the directory open in another application.

Further tries didn't even mention this dependency. Only the files in the lib folder were missing. Had to delete the browser-0.10.0+2 folder myself and run pub get on my project again.

[DartBot]

<img src="https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/719048?v=3" align="left" width="48" height="48"hspace="10"> Comment by paulevans

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For what it is worth it manifested itself for me as a previous get did an incomplete fetch. Then subsequent gets did not fill in the missing files. pub cache repair forced it to re download what was missing.

Something similar also just happened on our integration server - both times it was files missing from the intl package. I expect that is just a coincidence though.

[nex3]

There have been some major improvements to pub cache repair since this was filed, so I'm going to consider it fixed. If anyone has further issues with it, please feel free to file a new issue.