Re: Two newbie questions

[Larry Jones]

Paul Coene writes:
> 
> What do you mean by "CVS won't automatically merge binary files"?

I mean that if someone else checks in changes to a file that you've also
made changes to, CVS will won't merge their changes with your changes
when you update, it will just tell you that there's a conflict in a
nonmergeable file and leave it up to you to merge the changes manually.

> See, I  don't like having to know all the extensions.

Then don't put binary files in CVS; that isn't what it was designed for.

Maybe you don't care whether CVS actually works right or not, maybe you
only care that it works "good enough" for what you're doing.  But if you
do want it to work right, you *have* to tell it which files are text and
which are binary somehow.  If you can't do it with file extensions, then
you have to do it another way.  One way is to create a separate
directory tree that only contains the binary files (or just the text
files, if that's easier) and then import that tree first with the
appropriate -k option and then import the full tree with the other -k
option and the same release tag (importing the same file a second time
is a no-op, even if the -k option is different).  Another way is to not
use import at all but use add to manually add the files with the correct
-k options.

> Thanks! I ended up doing it via cvs admin -o 1.2: (which deleted all
> versions 1.2 and above).

Congratulations -- you've just screwed anyone who had one of those
revisions checked out.  Their working directory is now hosed and can't
be easily fixed.  Outdating revisions is something that should be done
rarely if at all, and only with great care.  Is there some reason you
didn't do it the right way (via merge), like I suggested?

-- Larry Jones

I don't think that question was very hypothetical at all. -- Calvin