[Xastir-dev] CVS broken big-time

[tbaggett at jump.net]

Hi Curt, et-al,

Speaking based on my experience supporting and administrating CVS in our company:

> Did the DNS problem affect anonymous CVS access as well?

Yes. When you check out a project from a CVS repository, the repository location is stored in a 'CVS' directory in each dir of your working sources. Since the hostname of the CVS server has now essentially changes from cvs.xastir.sourceforge.org to cvs.sourceforge.net (aka, cvs.sf.net)


> What should we do to fix this for all the CVS users, if necessary?

Yes, otherwise the next time they attempt a cvs update, they will encounter the same problem.

> Ask them to blow away their Xastir source directories and start
> over?

Either that, or ask them to run the script below. The script will fix their local working copy. I've had to have folks at our company do this a few times with the exact same script - except I used sed instead of the Write-Only PERL language ;-)

Note, that changing the setting of your CVSROOT environment variable (if set) will *not* affect any working copies you currently ahve checked out. They will emain checked out from the old domain name. I don't like the idea of editing your /etc/hosts file as it surely is only delaying problems that will arise later while we are no longer thinking about this.

find -name Root -path \*CVS\* -exec sed -e s/cvs.projectname.sf.net/cvs.sf.net/ {} \; -print

(I hope I got the escaping correct)

Basically, yeah, this sucks. It's a royal pain in the rear just getting 20 engineers to run a script like this. They tend to blow it off until they can't commit something


While I've got the floor, I want to throw a plug out there for Subversion (SVN). It's very similar to CVS, but fixes a lot of the problems inherent of CVS such as providing version control on directories, and being able to rename/copy files. It is awesome. Like a breath of fresh air or being released from a jail you didn't know you were held captive in ;-)


Anyway, that's my analysis on the CVS situation. Remember, you paid nothing for it, hihi!


73,
Tim
AA5DF