Re: sticky non-branch tags are sometines treated as branches in

[Alvaro Martinez Echevarria]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Larry Jones wrote:

> Alvaro Martinez Echevarria writes:
> >
> > In this case cvs has to create parent and then
> > parent/anotherparent before checking out the subdirectory we are
> > really interested in. Not only parent and parent/anotherparent
> > have a CVS/Tag file (IMO they shouldn't at all), but their tag is
> > marked as branch (which, again, is wrong).
>
> There is no right answer in this case.  CVS simply does not have
> sufficient information to tag parent directories "correctly", whatever
> that means.  (Note that CVS works on a directory at a time; there is no
> mechanism for files contained in a subdirectory to affect the processing
> of the parent directory.)  If parent directories weren't tagged at all,
> then new files would be added to the tip of the trunk, which might be
> better in your situation, but would undoubtedly be much worse in other,
> equally common situations.

Hmmm, I see. It all depends on how you use you repository, I
guess. If you're doing something like:

  CVSROOT/gnu/bash
  CVSROOT/gnu/libc
  CVSROOT/linux/kernel
  CVSROOT/linux/modules

where each of those second level subdirectories are
(non-branching-)tagged independently from the others, you're in
trouble.  When you create a new directory CVSROOT/gnu/grep, the
last thing you want is that to go under branch "2-05a" because
such happened to be the last version of bash you checked out.

Because this behaviour is "clearly wrong" in this situation, but
the alternative (do not create "Tag" files in parent directories)
would also be "clearly wrong" in other circumstances, would it be
crazy to add a command line option to checkout/update to control
which way it goes? Just checking, it doesn't hurt to ask... :)
Regards,

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