I had registered an archive with the name "cfox@cfconsulting.ca--2004--private". When I did a 'tla get', everything worked fine. But when I tried to do anything at all with the archive, tla would fail in wierd ways. And 'tla logs' did nothing, just returned.

It turns out that it was trying to look in a directory that had the name "cfox@cfconsulting.ca--2004" instead of "cfox@cfconsulting.ca--2004--private".

When it couldn't find the directory, it just quit (according to an strace). It should have printed the error before quitting.

This also indicates that the name you use for an archive seems to be sensitive to how many -- separators you use (something I don't remember being mentioned in the tutorial).