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Date:      Mon, 01 Sep 1997 09:33:01 -0700
From:      John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
To:        jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Buildworld failing (this happened yesterday also after cvsup  to RELENG_22)
Message-ID:  <199709011633.JAA02863@austin.polstra.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970831220313.811B-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org>
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.970831220313.811B-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org>

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> What is the deal?  I am not a cvsup expert by any means --- but
> isn't cvsup supposed to produce a perfect copy of the archive on the
> remote machine in an efficient and non-bandwidth intensive fashion?

Well of course it is!  There are only three situations where problems
can occur, to the best of my knowledge:

1. Somebody has completely replaced an RCS file in the repository with
a different RCS file that has a different set of revisions.  This
happened recently in ports/www/apache-current, and it led to a spate
of problems.  I have a plan for fixing this in the next release of
CVSup, which I plan to have ready in time for the 2.2.5 CD.  N.B., it
is completely bogus to replace an RCS file in an existing repository
-- but it happens sometimes.

2. HW or kernel errors have corrupted either an RCS file in the
repository or one of your "checkouts*" files in the client, often
without touching the modtime of the affected file.  It is hard to
anticipate all the different problems that can arise from something
like this.  But I'm working on making CVSup cope with it more
gracefully.

3. You have started out with an existing tree (not created by CVSup)
and have tried to adopt it into CVSup and update it.  This mostly
works, but if files have been deleted from the repository then you
may end up with some extra files in your source tree.  I'm working on
providing a way to avoid this problem.

If you get your tree using CVSup in the first place, and if there
aren't hardware or kernel problems that spam files on your system or
on the server, and if nobody does forbidden things to the repository,
it works perfectly all the time.

Also please note that CVSup _never_ gives you a corrupted file.  At
worst, it fails.  If you get file corruption, it's caused by a HW or
kernel failure on your machine or on the server.  Every updated file
gets its MD5 checksum verified every time.
--
   John Polstra                                       jdp@polstra.com
   John D. Polstra & Co., Inc.                Seattle, Washington USA
   "Self-knowledge is always bad news."                 -- John Barth



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