Re: changes getting clobbered--CVSREAD the culprit?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 04:45:45PM -0500, Larry Jones wrote:
> James Hughes writes:
> > Our problem 
> > is that we are finding that changes are routinely getting clobbered when 
> > 2 developers work on the same file. We have a strict regimen (I hope) of 
> >   always running "cvs update" before committing any changes.
> 
> In every case where I've seen this happen, it's because people run
> update while they have a file open in an editor and then save the file
> from the editor, wiping out the updated file.

I've also seen it in functionally similar, but more complicated,
situations.  For example: a user wants to do his editing on a
Windows box, but doesn't have WinCVS set up.  So he:
 1. does a "cvs update" in his sandbox on the UNIX server
 2. FTP's the sandbox to his desktop machine
 3. edits the desktop copy of the sandbox
 4. FTP's the sandbox back
 5. commits (with possible updates and merges of course)
At least that's what he does in theory.  If he gets the
sequencing wrong, he'll clobber either other users' changes (by
doing 2 before 1), or his own (by doing 3 before 2).

So be imaginative in looking for ways that users could be
doing stuff behind CVS's back to screw things up.

(Of course, there are possible linebreak-translation problems,
too, if someone does things as described above...)

--

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|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
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