Re: cvs [log aborted]: unrecognized operation error

[Larry Jones]

Carter Thompson writes:
> 
> What's the best way to go about resolving this error?  I've tried to
> find problems
> directly with the RCS file itself but I've been unable to find anything
> wrong with
> it and I'm afraid that I'm missing something obvious.

That error does, indeed, mean that the RCS file has been corrupted.  I
strongly suggest that you run the contrib/check_cvs script to check for
any other files in your repository that have also been corrupted.  There
are no good ways to resolve the problem.  Your best bet is to find a
recent backup (that isn't also corrupted) that you can restore and then
redo any subsequent changes.  If the damage isn't too severe, you may be
able to fix it by hand, but as you've discovered, that isn't an easy
process (you may want to see if RCS will give you any more information
about exactly were the problem lies).  You need to find out what caused
the corruption and make sure it doesn't happen again.  The most common
cause is using NFS to access the repository (subtle interoperability
problems between different NFS implementations are unfortunately
common).  Less common causes are hardware problems or someone manually
editing the file.

-Larry Jones

...That would be pretty cool, if they weren't out to kill me. -- Calvin