More on 1.11.2 corruption problem

[Mike Quinn]

OK,
configuration is a CVS database in an NFS or locally-mounted repository (I can
reproduce it either way),
Client was Red-Hat Linux (7.2, I think, but all I'm positive of is it's >= 7.0).

Our database is medium size, but it's been around for 5 years -
 the history file is about 100 MB and the commitLog is around 1/2 GB.

Nothing in cvsroot config.

We were using 1.10.7, but started getting the assert about fileattr and the
head of some queue being NULL (as luck would have it, I can't get it to happen
right now to paste the error),  There was information about 1.11 solving the
problem, so we updated to 1.11.2.

we added a branch tag, and at that point most of our CVS database became corrupt
(checkouts, updates, diffs all complain about the format of the files). Both
cvs tag and cvs rtag will reproduce the problem. Nothing special - just

cvs tag -b -r <branch> <newbranch>      or the rtag equivalent

I've restored our database from a backup, and if I add a tag, I can duplicate
the problem.  Everything looks fine if you check out the HEAD of the tree, but
if you try to check out any branch tag, you will get corruption problems.  
Different
files are noticed by different branches (Obviously depends where the corruption 
is).
I haven't detected any pattern to the corruption, but I haven't looked all that 
hard.

There's nothing really special about our database except it's been around a 
while
(June 25, 1998).

-Mike Quinn