Re: Checkout inconsistencies -- known bug?

[Kaz Kylheku]

In article <address@hidden>, Larry Jones wrote:
>Kaz Kylheku writes:
>> 
>> People I work with have reported similar behavior when checking out to a
>> tagged release; directories did not get created even though -P pruning
>> was not turned on.
>
>-P *was* turned on -- -r implies -P.  -P should be the default -- that

Doh! It's even documented in ``cvs --help checkout'', never mind
elsewhere. I probably knew about this once, but never ran into this
because it has never occured to me to do anything silly like caring
about whether some empty directory is checked out.

>it isn't is just a historical accident and many recommend adding it to
>your ~/.cvsrc file to correct that and avoid the inconsistency.

I agree that pruning should be default. If you want the directories,
put some dummy files. Else prune it away.

>> The solution is to use those dummy files, because you want those certain
>> empty directories to show up no matter what, even if pruning is specified.
>
>A better solution is to have a build script that you run after checking
>out the module that creates the appropriate directory structure as
>required.

Yes, no kidding. But *try* telling some people that supporting empty
directories in the version control system is completely unproductive,
because these directories are just needed locally.

[ For this reason, In Meta-CVS, I decided not to support empty
directories at all, even though in principle it could be done. A
directory is effectively considered to be an operating system artifact
caused by the existence of some file that has a multi-component path
name. When two files have the same path prefix, they are said to be in
the same directory, but the Meta-CVS software doesn't care about that;
it's simply an artifact of how paths work in the operating system. So
when you rename all of the files out of a directory, it no longer exists
because the path prefix no longer exists. If the directory is physically
empty in the working copy after such a rename, it automatically
disappears. ]