Last post, I mentioned that we were bitten by a bug that showed up during late-in-the-game testing that didn't make a lot of sense, and was quite nasty in certain complex situations. This bug caused the "release process" to grind to a halt.
Well, I'm happy to say that, as of about two minutes ago, I've managed to figure out what's going on.
Basically, a folder can become "magic" in some situations, and even when the conditions that made it "magic" are reversed, the "magic" sticks around when it shouldn't. Unfortunately, this "magic" acted as a sort of "protective spell" on the folder, and was preventing us from doing anything.
Unfortunately, there's no 'external' visibility for when the "magic" sticks around, so we were seeing something that basically didn't make any sense. On top of that, it's new behavior in Leopard, which is why we've never seen it before. Fortunately, thanks to Amit Singh's recently-updated-for-Leopard hfsdebug (thanks, Amit -- love the book, too), I was able to drop down into the guts of HFS+ and determine what's happening.
Now that the problem's understood, we can implement an effective workaround. The workaround will mean that in some situations it'll re-copy a bit more than it should when Smart Updating. But, at least the result produced will be correct: and the workaround will break the spell, and remove the "magic".
Which is—let me tell you—a relief. (For those of you out there who have hit this kind of WTF-roadblock, where you have no idea what's wrong and thus can't even estimate how long it's going to take to figure it out and fix it, you know what I mean.) And for any Apple engineers reading, the (incorrect) behavior is described in rdar://5687977.
So, anyway, now that that data-integrity-related bug is getting wrapped up, we're back to putting together a final test build (should be in the next day or two), a bit of time to let our test group run their scenarios, etc.
So, barring another similar issue (please, no) showing up during testing, as I indicated in the comments of the previous post, it should be a week or so...
