[Exist-open] Schroedinger's file state

[Christian A. <chr...@ge...>]

Dear all,

this happened to me now several times during the past half year, and on 
different machines. We are using eXist 5.2.0 on several machines (Ubuntu).

Sometimes, when a user renames e.g. an existing directory/collection, 
the renaming works - somehow. The name is changed, but the content of 
the collection is not accessible anymore. Re-renaming the collection is 
not possible. Deleting the renamed collection is not possible.

Creating a new collection with the old name is also not possible. eXist 
then reports that this collection already exists (also it was renamed).

Our users use Oxygen XML Author to handle our XML files and collections.

As an admin, I use the following tools to try to get rid of those 
collections:

  * WebDAV (via Oxygen XML Author)
  * eXide in the browser and the file manager you can access from there
  * Java Admin Client (bin/client.sh)

All of those do not work.

So in these cases, I have Schroedinger's collections: I can see them in 
the tools mentioned above but I not access them because they do not 
exist anymore. At the same time, I can not delete or replace them as 
they somehow still exist.

Fun fact: I even had XML files I could not access via any of the tools 
above, but they could be accessed by XQuery scripts that were exactly 
reading these files.

Usually, in these cases, I re-install eXist-db and restore a current 
backup. But I am pretty tired of this workaround.

Is this a problem of indexing? How can it be solved?

Thanks for all advise in advance.

Christian