cvsadmin group is ignored; ! in cvsignore does not work

[dominik]

Hi!

I have two questions that I already posted to
comp.software.version-mgmt. There was no reply though. (No one knew
the answer??)

First question:
I would like only some users to be able to use the admin command.
So I created a "cvsadmin" group (the server runs on redhat linux 7.1)
and put the cvs user names of those people into this group
(The source code seems to indicate that cvs user names rather than
system accounts have to be used here. Am I right?),
but when I try to run the admin command from Win2000 or WinNT (via
pserver method), I get the error message:
"cvs [server aborted]: usage is restricted to members of the group
Administrators." (!)

Btw. I am mapping all cvs user names to the system account "cvs".
Would it work if I created an ordinary system account for every CVS
user?
What else could be wrong here?

Second question:
I wonder how to use the ! in the repository-wide cvsignore file in
CVSROOT/.
I do not want to have *.exe files ignored when importing, updating and
releasing, so I tried the following in the file CVSROOT/cvsignore
(i.e. for the whole repository):
################
# ! as first item to clear ignore list
!
*.old
*.bak
.#*
# etc. basically all the default patterns that (should) have been
# cleared from the list by my using ! above but are really to be 
# ignored; *.exe *not* included in this list
#################

This doesn't work!
Why? Where can I find better documentation about this file?
The source code for this part is rather confusing to read.

Thanks.
dominik schramm