curious behavior on remote cvs call

[rene reitsma]

Dear CVS users,

I'm wondering if one of you could explain an interesting behavior I
observe when using remote cvs calls.

I have a cvs repository on a RH 8.0 machine, that gets accessed
remotely from other Linux machines as well as from Windows XP machines
(running cvsnt).

The operations seem to work just fine, except for one curious thing:

A little while ago, the repository underwent a set of 'cvs remove
<file_name>'
transactions, including one where I removed a directory. Since I was
aware that a cvs remove <directory> does not really stick, I went into
the actual repository and removed the directory itself (/bin/rm -r
<directoy>) after first executing 'cvs remove' commands on all of the
files in the directory (no subdirectories involved here).

When I now remotely checkout the repository from Linux machines,
everything works fine. The directory previously removed from the
repository does no longer show up and cvs prints no error messages.

However, when I issue the same remote checkout from a Windows machine,
the checkout runs fine (the previously removed directory no longer
shows up), but cvs complains that it cannot access the previously
removed directory.

Here are the outputs of the checkout on either platform:

On Linux:

>cvs -d <login>:<remote cvs root> co mybranch

cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/activities
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/broad_categories
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/curricular_units
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/lessons

On Windows:

> cvs -d :ssh:<login>:<remote cvs root> co mybranch

cvs server: Updating oollection/mybranch
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/activities
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/activities/act1
cvs server: cannot open directory
<cvs_root>/collection/activities/act1
cvs server: skipping directory <cvs_root>/collection/activities/act1
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/broad_categories
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/curricular_units
cvs server: Updating collection/mybranch/lessons

Notice how in both cases the result is the same, but in the Windows
case cvs complains about the previously removed directory 'act_1'
whereas in the Linux case it does not.

Can someone explain this behavior?

Thanks