Serious misbehavior of tags in Retrospect 11.5.0

[twickland]

I have recently run into three instances where source tags appeared to have spontaneously duplicated themselves after adding or deleting a client source. That is to say that where there had been one instance of a given tag, now there were two with the same name. Checking or unchecking either one of the duplicate tags would result in the same condition being set for the second duplicate tag. Whenever these duplicate tags were generated, I was able to delete the second example.

 

Upon further study, I realized that the situation was more complicated. Each duplicate tag listing replaced another tag previously listed on the Tags list. It's not clear whether this apparent switching of one tag for another actually happened in the engine or was only an incorrect display in the console, as I did not try relaunching the console before deleting the (apparently) duplicate tag. It was only after stopping and restarting the engine and relaunching the console (which I did for a reason unrelated to this bug) that I realized that several of our original tags were missing.

 

This problem first surfaced when I was unable to remove a client source after several attempts. This client had five favorite folders, and after the failed client removal attempts, I found I was able to remove four of the five favorite folders by highlighting them and clicking the Remove button. The fifth folder still could not be removed, nor could the client. It was then that I noticed a duplicated tag in the Tags pane. When I removed one instance of the duplicate tag, the client disappeared from the Sources list without my having to click on the Remove button again. I did not notice at this time that an infrequently-used tag was now missing from the Tags list (we have quite a number of tags, as you might have guessed).

 

The following day, I added two new client sources and defined a couple of favorite folders on each. When I then went to the Tags pane, I noticed there were now two duplicate tags in the list; that is to say, there were two different tags, each of which had been duplicated once. I highlighted and removed the duplicates and selected the desired tags. Again, I failed to notice that two more of our lesser-used tags did not appear on the Tags list.

 

Today, after stopping/restarting the engine and relaunching the console, I discovered that what had actually happened was that three of our most-used tags—tags that I had apparently been able to select yesterday—had disappeared from the Tags list, and the little-used tags that has not been visible yesterday were actually still on the list!

 

It would also appear that in stopping and restarting the engine today, I probably got the engine out of whatever peculiar state it had been in, as I was unable to replicate the problem by removing and re-adding a source client. I did stop and restart the engine a couple of times the day before yesterday when I was having trouble deleting the client, but I can't recall whether I also did this between the time I noticed the duplicate tag and successfully deleted the troublesome client and when I added the two new clients.

 

Retrospect 11.5.0 (139) running on Mac Pro 3.2 GHz Quad-Core under OS 10.6.8.