[Techtalk] Using CVS to track a CVS tree?

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 09:43:33PM +0200 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Almut Behrens thought:
> 
> What exactly does it mean to maintain compatibility with them?  Does he
> need to keep the CVS directories in his local tree, referring to the
> original repository? 

Yes.

> Does he ever need to submit changes to their
> repository himself, or would he only ever send them tarball snapshots? 

Only the tarball.

> If so, do those have to contain the original CVS meta info?

Yes.  As I understand it, he submits a tarball of his current config to
the support team who cvsdiff it against their repository showing them what
he's changed.
 
> In case he needs to keep those CVS dirs, it's probably easiest to use a
> different revision management system on his side, in order to avoid
> having them interfere.

That looks likely.  I might try to use him as an SVN guinea pig...
 
> OTOH, if he desperately wants to use CVS, he could - in theory - patch
> the CVS sources to use a different name for the meta info directories
> (e.g. MyCVS/), and then use his own special CVS version. 

I was desperately scanning 'man cvs', 'info cvs', our Jenn's 'Essential
CVS' for the server config option to specify the name of the meta
directory and couldn't find one.  Bummer!

I suspect it would be easier {and less likely to be a maintenance
nightmare at upgrade time} to do some ugly kludge script in
$CVSROOT/CVSROOT to move the original CVS dirs to 'TheirCVS' for
checkin/out/update and export as the original CVS.  Alternatively, he
could keep a tarball of the CVS dirs somewhere in the tree to be unpacked
for snapshotting purposes.  It's gonna be messy either way though...

> However, it might turn out to be more involved

Yep...

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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