Fuzz Productions

RoR Problem[SOLVED]: rake vlad:deploy aborted with error “shift: 634: can’t shift that many”

term$: rake --trace vlad:deploy RAILS_ENV=production
(in /Users/me/Sites/thesite-public)
** Invoke vlad:deploy (first_time)
** Invoke vlad:update (first_time)
** Execute vlad:update
ssh thesite_admin 'cd /var/www/thesite_public/scm && rm -rf /var/www/thesite_public/scm/repo && git clone git@github.com:username/thesite-public.git /var/www/thesite_public/scm/repo && cd /var/www/thesite_public/scm/repo && git submodule update --init && git checkout -f -b deployed-origin/master origin/master && cd - && mkdir -p /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222 && cd repo && git archive --format=tar deployed-origin/master | (cd /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222 && tar xf -) && git submodule foreach 'git archive --format=tar $sha1 | (cd /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/$path && tar xf -)' && cd - && cd .. && chmod -R g+w /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222 && rm -rf /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/log /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/public/system /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/tmp/pids && mkdir -p /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/db /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222/tmp'
Initialized empty Git repository in /var/www/thesite_public/scm/repo/.git/
Initialized empty Git repository in /var/www/thesite_public/scm/repo/.git/
shift: 634: can't shift that many
ssh thesite_admin 'rm -rf /var/www/thesite_public/releases/20100126204222'
rake aborted!

This cryptic message popped up today, and nobody could make heads or tails of it. A quick search produced slim results, the most interesting being a difference in argument counts in sh shell vs. ash shell.

Since our problem didn’t have anything to do with this, we looked at a higher level problem.

term$: gem list

produced the relevant facts:

vlad (2.0.0)
vlad-git (2.1.0, 2.0.0)

so we ran

term$: sudo gem uninstall vlad-git -v 2.1.0
Successfully uninstalled vlad-git-2.1.0

then

term$: rake vlad:deploy RAILS_ENV=production

and it worked. Still not sure exactly why, but at least it works.