RE: Branches without a magic branch number

[Rick Genter]

Is it possible that some sort of tool used in the Mozilla release/build process deletes these tags? Also, how can you tell which user caused the tag to be removed? ("It has happened 680 times by a lot of different people.")

Our internal repository, while only 3 years old and only a few hundred MB, has about 100 branches and maybe 500-600 tags and we've yet to "lose" one. Given how prevalent CVS is in the world, I find it difficult to believe that there would be a bug that would cause it to spontaneously remove magic branch tags...


-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Smirl [mailto:address@hidden]
Sent: Sat 6/17/2006 11:43 AM
To: Rick Genter
Cc: address@hidden; Keith Packard
Subject: Re: Branches without a magic branch number

On 6/17/06, Rick Genter <address@hidden> wrote:
> On a repository of that size, longevity and disparate user-set, it wouldn't
> surprise me if someone, at some time in the past, simply deleted the tag
> (tag -d). The revisions would still exist, of course, but there would be no
> way to get to the tip of the branch. Presumably someone would have tagged
> the tip of the branch before deleting the magic branch tag in case they
> *did* want to get back to it, but then the only reasonable thing you could
> do would be to form a new branch off of that tag.

It has happened 680 times by a lot of different people. Tools that
export the repository are detecting these unnamed branches. The
branches are being reconstructed by correlating the commit comments.

There are 1,800 branches in the repository, that would imply that 1/3
of them had the magic tag removed manually.

--
Jon Smirl
address@hidden