cvs admin -b bugs

[Ken McMillan]

I got in a situation where I did some development on a branch and then
decided I would like to keep the branch as my mainline and throw
away my changes on the mainline. I thought I could do this by

cvs admin -b[branch-name]

as described in the manual section on reverting to the vendor branch.
However, there are two major problems with this that I would consider
to be bugs:

1) There were many files that had no changes on the branch. That is,
there was a tag for a "magic branch", but no such actual branch in the
rcs file.  The command "cvs admin -b[branch-name]" caused the default
branch of these files to be set to "branch-name" even though that
branch name did not actually exist in the rcs file. This caused a
"nothing known about" error on checkout. Clearly, -b should
create the "magic" branch in the rcs file if it hasn't ben created
yet.

2) The files that I had created on the branch were left in the "attic"
by the "cvs admin -b" command. The result is they were not
subsequently checked out, even though they were on the default branch.
Clearly, "cvs admin -b[branch-name]" should move the rcs file out of the attic
if it is not dead on the new default branch, and similarly put it in
the attic if it is dead on the new default branch. Either that, or "cvs
checkout" has a problem when "head" and "branch" differ -- this depends
on how you define the function of the "attic", I suppose.


-- 
Ken McMillan                            E-Mail: mcmillan@cadence.com
Cadence Berkeley Laboratories           Phone:  (510) 647-2830
2001 Addison Street, 3rd floor          FAX:    (510) 486-0205
Berkeley, CA, 94704-1103
http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kenmcmil