[Python-apps-team] Bug#817231: rabbitvcs: All files in home folder removed

[Bastian Pranzas]

Source: rabbitvcs
Severity: critical
Justification: causes serious data loss

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
I just wanted a quick and easy way to access my work svn from my home computer, so I googled and found rabbitvcs. I am running debian jessie and saw that it is in the repo, so I just installed it.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
I just used it a few minutes:
- I conntected to my work svn using "browse repository" or similar, which worked nicely
- I went to a certain directory in the repo and tried to just copy a file out using drag&drop into nautilus, which did nothing
- Next thing I tried was the "export" function, so I tried that and it told me something like "authentication failed"
- Then I tried to check out the folder containing the file, which gave the same problem
(I did all steps above from the repository browser)
- Note that at no point in time did the program ask me if I want to delete or overwrite anything. I might have used the program wrongly, but I assumed that because it is "easy to use" like tortoisesvn, that I don't have to read the documentation to prevent data loss.

   * What was the outcome of this action?
- Then I went back to nautilus and noticed that it won't show my user folders anymore, my desktop wallpaper was gone, etc
- I checked if there is anything mounted over my home folder, which wasn't the case

   * What outcome did you expect instead?
I expected the file/folder to appear where I tried to export/check them out.

I found this using google:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/473433/rabbitsvn-deleted-all-my-folders
which is basically the same story as mine.

On the rabbitvcs homepage in the "known issues" section, in the project bug tracker and the user mailing list of the project I found no mention of it. I wanted to report it to the mailing list, but it appears I can't get the right to post.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.3
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)