Re: bin/42961: cvs near-silently throws away local mods

["Greg A. Woods" <woods%planix.ca@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/42961; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods%planix.ca@localhost>
To: NetBSD GNATS <gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost>
Cc: 
Subject: Re: bin/42961: cvs near-silently throws away local mods
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:33:02 -0500

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 At Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:15:01 +0000 (UTC), dholland%eecs.harvard.edu@localhost 
wrote:
 Subject: bin/42961: cvs near-silently throws away local mods
 >=20
 > This is a pretty serious problem, as I and a lot of people keep random
 > uncommitted/local changes in source trees and rely on CVS not to
 > randomly lose them like this.
 
 In fact this is in effect the only way I use CVS with NetBSD.
 
 All my local changes are kept in local working directories where I
 frequently run "cvs -q update -dP" to get upstream changes.
 
 As far as I can remember though I've never seen the error you mention.
 
 One major difference is, in this case with how I use NetBSD CVS at
 least, I use a local copy of the whole repository, so there's never any
 network connection involved.  I.e. I don't think my usage case ever
 touches the same code path that causes you the error, so I suppose it's
 not surprising that I've never seen a similar error.
 
 Anyway, there are at least two possibilities for your error:
 
 1. it could be due to this bug:
 
        http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?17032
 
    (basically a problem with keyword expansion not resulting in the same
    text on both the server and client side)
 
 2. could the timestamps in your working directory have been wrong?
 
        http://www.mail-archive.com/info-cvs%nongnu.org@localhost/msg03179.html
 
    this same issue is further discussed in this very recent bug report:
 
        http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?29058
 
 Interestingly the same error appeared in an automated daily update
 status message:
 
     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2000/10/12/0008.html
 
 There shouldn't have been any changes in those working directories, so
 that might have been an example of the first possibility.
 
 I must say one of the reasons I only use the rsync'ed copy of the
 repository (other than the obvious advantages of speed and availability)
 is for the very reason that the logic and handling in the client/server
 mode in CVS is far less trustworthy than the local mode.  I've just
 never really trusted the client/server code very much, despite having
 worked on it for quite a long time as a maintainer.
 
 --=20
                                                Greg A. Woods
                                                Planix, Inc.
 
 <woods%planix.com@localhost>       +1 416 218 0099        
http://www.planix.com/
 
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