Re: how to prevent cvs from locking?

[Jim Hyslop]

DC wrote:
> I would rather put a non-existant email address out there, then one that im 
> never going to look at. At least they might get a bounce back if
> it dosn't exist.  But, for the sake of newsgroup postings, I have created a 
> gmail account.
[snicker] Nice name for the spam trap.

> it is a very small group of developers. Most of the time they will be in 
> completely different places on the branch.
Doesn't matter. All it takes is for someone to do a repository-wide 
command, such as applying a tag, at the same time as someone else is 
trying to write to the repository and your repository will become 
corrupted, possibly beyond repair.

> For the most part people
> don't touch each others files, and when they do there is usually a discussion 
> of how/what/what/etc before hand.
Ah, the strong, strong smell of code ownership.

> If it were my descision I would set this up so that people create files as 
> username:cvspub rather then cvspub:cvspub.
That's reasonable.

> I would also make it
> so that two people could not checkout the same file at the same time.
That's not ;=) Remember that the "C" in "CVS" stands for "Concurrent" - 
CVS is designed specifically to allow and handle concurrent 
modifications to files. But that's another rant for another day, and 
doesn't solve your immediate problem, which is:

> Error:
> cvs: rcs.c:4114: RCS_checkout: Assertion `rev == ((void *)0) || ((*__ctype_b_loc 
> ())[(int) (((unsigned char) *rev))] & (unsigned short int)
> _ISdigit)' failed. 
> Terminated with fatal signal 11 

Because CVS gets this fatal signal, it doesn't get a chance to clean up 
after itself. The lock files are left behind, causing problems for the 
next person who comes along.

Larry Jones has suggested this error means your repository file is 
corrupted. If other users try to check out the file, do they get the 
same crash?

Download the source code from www.nongnu.org/cvs, and run the 
validate_repo script in the contrib/ directory. This will scan the 
repository for corrupted files. If the file is corrupted, the easiest 
course of action is to restore it from your most recent backup. Also, 
you must try to determine how it got corrupted in the first place, 
otherwise this problem could happen again.

--
Jim