Re: attic files

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Schwenk, Jeanie wrote:

> Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 17:54:50 -0700
> From: "Schwenk, Jeanie" <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [info-cvs] RE: attic files
> 
> Isn't there an easier way to get back all the files, complete with their
> history and branches?

The move to the Attic is a red herring; that is purely an internal
representation that you need not be concerned about. Files in the Attic
are those which have a dead revision on the main trunk (they once
existed on the trunk but have been cvs rm'd or else were added on a
branch and not yet merged to the trunk).

Thanks to Attic, the CVS process has a smaller directory to scan when
checking out or updating the tip of the main trunk; it's not processing
directory entries of these files only to find out they are dead.

Another design choice geared toward making main trunk tip operations
fast is the RCS format itself, which has an explicit representation of
the main trunk head revision. Deltas must be applied to retrieve any
other revision.

What you can do to recover the files is to ``cvs update -D
<date/time>'' where <date/time> specifies a time just before the
vendor branch import happened. This will retrieve the live versions of
your removed files as they existed before the removal.

My solution would be to apply the vendor patch in reverse to undo
the vendor import: cvs update -j <tag>:<after-date> -j <tag>:<before-date>.
Then resolve any conflicts, get the baseline into good
shape again, and migrate to a system that can properly integrate the
restructured third party source tree.