Diff treats files as text after they have been flagged -kb

[Jack Dodds]

I'm looking for some help with a problem in binary file handling.

We use CVS to control a collection (dozens) of Watcom C/C++ software projects 
under Windows 98. For most of our work, we interface to CVS through WinCVS 1.2. 
 WinCVS 1.2 incorporates CVS 1.10, if I understand correctly.

The Watcom IDE creates and maintains "project" (.WPJ) and "target" (.TGT) files to hold 
all the project information (e.g. compiler options).  These are structured as text files, but are not human 
readable.  When we first set up CVS and imported the software directory structure, we made the mistake of 
calling the .WPJ and .TGT files "text" files. As a result, when we made changes and then did a diff 
on the project directory structure, we got pages of useless output showing unintelligible changes to the .WPJ 
and .TGT files.

We now check in new .WPJ and .TGT files as "binary", which eliminates the 
useless diff output.

However this leaves the original .WPJ and .TGT "text" files. I used cvs admin to attach the -kb flag to all the .WPJ and .TGT files both in the repository and the sandbox, expecting this to fix the problem.  (This lead to some CR/LF problems when old versions of the .WPJ and .TGT files were checked out, but I was able to write a utility to fix that.)  

In spite of flagging all the old .WPJ and .TGT files -kb, diff still compares 
the files as if they were text files.

Any suggestions as to how to fix this?  I could of course export the whole 
project and import it into a completely new repository, but I would lose the 
history in the present repository.

--
Jack Dodds
R & D Manager
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Unit #3
3781 Victoria Park Avenue
Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
M1W 3K5
Voice 416-491-7340
Fax   416-491-7378
email "Jack Dodds" <address@hidden>