[rdiff-backup-users] Bug report: Symbolic link replacing directory

[john]

Hi all!

How to confuse a backup system? Maybe you should try this approach, it
worked for me. :-(

Confusion recipe for rdiff-backup V12.6:

Create two directories (dir1 and dir2).
Create two files, dir1/file1 and dir2/file2.
Backup the stuff.
Move file2 to dir1/file2.
Remove dir2.
Symlink dir2 -> dir1
Backup the stuff.

This gives the following error message:

UpdateError dir1/file2 File changed from regular file before signature.

And file2 is not in the backup.

I cannot see any mention of this behaviour in the changelog of V12.7,
so I gues this version should do the same. Otherwise I would have
updated and tested again.

As a workaround to this bug, I thought about deleting dir2 in the
increment directory. That way I would lose old history, but that
doesn`t really matter. But what to do with the metadata, so the whole
backup remains consistent?

Open Christmas
John