Re: Branching behavior and binary file Qs

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 01:51:15PM -0600, Steve Lane wrote:
> The moment I import Prod-Old, all its files are already at
> 1.1.1.1.

Yes.  See:
        http://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs_13.html#SEC104
in particular the introductory "13." section preceding Section
13.1.

> Each of them has a previous version 1.1, which
> in every case I've looked at is identical to 1.1.1.1.

An artifact of the underlying RCS file format -- you can't have
an RCS branch that that doesn't branch *from* anywhere.  So CVS
has to create rev. 1.1, simply as a root for the vendor branch.


> Question 2: the production version of the app contains many large binary
> files. I have no desire to CVS these. I know how to use cvsignore to skip
> them, but don't they then get deleted if I do a full checkout and replace
> the production version of the app?

Yes.  If instead you do "cvs update" in the existing production
directory, the binaries will be left alone.

The alternative is to restore the binaries after a checkout, by
some means external to CVS.  How you do this rather depends on
what the binaries consist of:  human-edited images would need to
be copied or symlinked in from somewhere else, but for compiled
code you might decide to just recompile it.  In either case, the
usual approach is to write a script, Makefile, or whatever to
drive the process -- and then track that file in CVS.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
A distributed system is one on which I cannot get any work done,
because a machine I have never heard of has crashed.
        - Leslie Lamport