I have just discovered this bug in CVS, relating to edits being cleared when a user performs a checkout or export of a module. See https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?23370 for more info on this.

Unfortunately, this is severely impacting our workflow. Our group does a lot of development in graphical, model-based software tools, and those files cannot be merged easily. We rely heavily on cvs-edit commands, and the fact the the edits are being cleared is causing us lots of grief.

I have attempted to create a workaround using the CVS scripting hooks, and I've got a solution that almost works, but doesn't quite make the cut. I'm turning here out of desperation, hoping someone might have a great idea on how to solve this.

Here is an overview of what I've attempted so far. CVS stores the edit/watch info inside the repository in CVS/fileattr files for each directory in CVS. The "notify" administrative file allows programs to be run whenever a user performs cvs-edit or cvs-unedit. I was able to create a perl-script that was run via notify that created a copy of all fileattr files affected by the unedit or edit command. The fileattr files were copied into a "fileattribbackup" subdirectory of CVSROOT, which mimics the directory structure of the actual repository.

The next step is to then copy the "backup" fileattr files stored in CVSROOT into the repository whenever a user performs a checkout, which can be performed by specifying the perl script to run in the "modules" file.

Now, the problem I'm facing is that when my script is called from "notify", CVS has not yet modified the fileattr files, so the files that get copied into the CVSROOT backup area are basically 1-rev behind. This is my major roadblock at this point. Does anyone have better ideas of how to handle this?

Another idea I was throwing around was to monitor all of the "fileattr" files for changes in a continuously running process, which would copy them to the backup location when they change. Then the checkout script could run as before. This seems like asking for trouble (at least more than the previous solution), because then I need to deal with cvs locks and such.

In reply to perl and CVS by iKnowNothing

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