Strange dir behavior and Emptydir

[Pyatt, Scott]

When doing a checkout from the trunk, CVS creates directories in the
workspace even if they are empty.  You can prevent empty directories from
being created by using "-P" to prune empty directories or if "-r" or "-D"
are specified.  Therefore, if you are checking out a branch using "-r
branch", empty directories are pruned.  In the past when I've wanted to do
perform some work to one of these empty directories, I simply do something
like this:

    cvs co -r theBranch theModule
    cd parentDir
    cvs up -d theDir

I've never had a problem with this until today.  Today I do this and the
"cvs up -d theDir" gives me the following message:

    cvs server: nothing known about theDir

Obviously "theDir" is not the real name of the directory, but will suffice
to illustrate my problem.  The interesting thing is that "theDir" does exist
in the repository (I checked to make sure) and there is active work in this
directory on several other branches as well as on the trunk.  I tried the
following: 

    cd parentDir
    mkdir theDir
    cvs add theDir

For this example assume "parentDir" is "/dirA/dirB/dirC".  The command
produced the following output.

    Directory /cvsroot/CVSROOT/Emptydir/theDir added to the repository

Why did CVS create "theDir" under "/cvsroot/CVSROOT/Emptydir" instead of
under "/cvsroot/dirA/dirB/dirC" which is where I was expecting it to get
created in the repository.  I've searched CVS documentation everywhere and
can find no reference to "Emptydir".  

What is this "$CVSROOT/Emptydir"?  Is it possible that it is related to
using an alias module defined in the "$CVSROOT/modules"?  How do I get back
to the behavior I thought I knew before?

TIA,
-Scott

____________________________________

Scott Pyatt
Release Engineering Manager

Selectica, Inc.
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www.selectica.com

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