>>>I'm pretty sure that "gdb" became a directory at one stage, so the left
>>>over gdb file from an earlier build will bugger things up.
>>
>>really?  that must have been quite recent.  i believe i last updated
>>on tuesday afternoon.
>
>Actually the gdb directory is no longer there, and hasn't been there for a
>"long time" (I encountered this same problem about 6 months ago), but it
>*was* there at some time in the past. Due to suboptimal behavior of CVS wrt
>deleted directories, it first tries to create this now-extinct directory
>before pruning it back (if you've specified -P somewhere), resulting in the
>error.

i was using "cvs update -d -P" as i learned it from

   http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/current/#using-anoncvs

in the part entitled "To update the sources".

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