This page is mostly a place holder to be filled out as common problems are noticed. If you see someone pop up on IRC confused, and a few helpful comments get them straightened out, please jot them down here. To help us kee how bad problems are, add an "x" where noted if a hint helps you out.

Patches to make these hints unnecessary -- either to the manual or the code -- would be wonderful.

Runtime Problems

I get a segfault every time I run mtn

This almost always turns out to be the result of mismatched C++ libraries. The common cause of this is that your mtn binary and the Boost libraries monotone uses on were built using different versions of the C++ compiler and ended up linked against different versions of libstdc++.

Check for this using ldd

ldd /path/to/mtn | grep 'stdc++'
  libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.6/libstdc++.so.5 (0xb7aae000)
  libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.6/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7d32000)

In this example, mtn had been freshly built, but Boost had not been rebuilt since a compiler upgrade. This caused mtn to be linked against libstdc++.so.6 when the Boost libraries were still linked against libstdc++.so.5. Rebuilding Boost was the solution in this case.

Client/Server Problems

I get usage information when attempting to sync over ssh

This will happen if the remote host is running an older version of monotone. This is because the specification of a branch pattern to serve was dropped from the mtn serve command in recent versions. This can be fixed by modifying the get_netsync_connect_command hook to execute the remote mtn process with '*' as the branch pattern. The following modified hook can be placed your monotonerc file (probably in _MTN/monotonerc), to resolve this issue.

function get_netsync_connect_command(uri, args)

    local argv = nil

    if uri["scheme"] == "ssh"
        and uri["host"]
        and uri["path"] then

        argv = { "ssh" }
        if uri["user"] then
            table.insert(argv, "-l")
            table.insert(argv, uri["user"])
        end
        if uri["port"] then
            table.insert(argv, "-p")
            table.insert(argv, uri["port"])
        end

        table.insert(argv, uri["host"])
    end

    if uri["scheme"] == "file" and uri["path"] then
        argv = { }
    end

    if argv then

        table.insert(argv, get_mtn_command(uri["host"]))

        if args["debug"] then
            table.insert(argv, "--debug")
        else
            table.insert(argv, "--quiet")
        end

        table.insert(argv, "--db")
        table.insert(argv, uri["path"])
        table.insert(argv, "serve")
        table.insert(argv, "*")
        table.insert(argv, "--stdio")
        table.insert(argv, "--no-transport-auth")

        if args["include"] then
            table.insert(argv, args["include"])
        end

        if args["exclude"] then
            table.insert(argv, "--exclude")
            table.insert(argv, args["exclude"])
        end
    end
    return argv
end

Check Your Quoting

On Windows

mtn sync myhost.com 'mybranch'

does not find a branch named mybranch, but

mtn sync myhost.com "mybranch"

does.

Also on Windows, glob expansion can be rather funky, e.g.

mtn sync myhost.com '*'

and

mtn sync myhost.com "*"

...will both undergo glob expansion, resulting in a command-line which contains a list of files in the current directory. To get around this, use

mtn sync myhost.com "{}*"

Add an 'x' here if this helped you: x

Check your permissions

A bug in monotone right now is that it does a lousy job of giving feedback when your permissions are set up wrong -- usually the server will just drop your connection, instead of sending you a message explaining why. If your new server does not appear to be accepting your connections try:

• checking the server log for any notes about permissions

• make sure your read permission file is correct -- it is in a simple little language that looks like:

  pattern "*"
  allow "abe@juicebot.co.jp"
  allow "beth@juicebot.co.jp"
  
  

  to allow Abe and Beth read access to all branches, or

  pattern "foo*"
  allow "*"
  
  

  to allow anonymous access to all branches whose names begin "foo".

• make sure your write permission file is correct -- it is not the same format as the read permission file, because write permissions are per-db, while read permissions are per-branch. (This has to do with the somewhat amorphous nature of monotone branches.) A write permissions file might look like

  abe@juicebot.co.jp
  beth@juicebot.co.jp
  
  

Add an 'x' here if this helped you:

xxx

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