[Sussex] Fw: Beware cygwin and CVS - moving tree risks.

[dominic.clay at btopenworld.com]

This was on another list, and as I have a win XP machine with Cygwin and a Linux machine both running CVS it was interesting to me.

Thought some other (newbies) might be interested too...

Dominic


>  subject: Fw: Beware cygwin and CVS - moving tree risks.
> 
> 
> This is just a friendly note for anyone using cywin and CVS in a mixed 
> environment (with samba and linux).
> 
> As you are probably aware CVS stores it's control files as text files 
> and does not like spurious "\r"'s in random strings that it reads.  FINE 
> - trees checked out on unix remain as trees checked out on unix (even 
> though you can get to them via samba shares, jou just DON'T do that.
> 
> Until yesterday, I was not aware that cygwin changes the text file line 
> endings depedning on which windoze share you are opening - YIKES !
> 
> That means a tree checked out on an NT machine, moved to a linux machine 
> and shared through a share has changed it's line-ending semantics which 
> means the *same* cygwin/cvs is unable to use that tree.
> 
> I recently has a collegue  that accidently nuked his Windoze system 
> registry and had to re-install.  To save his tree we booted linux and 
> saved the entire NTFS partition on another linux box, we then mounted 
> that partition on the linux box (using the loopback file device - very 
> cool - cudos to the nerds who did this one!) and viola, new box, old 
> tree, samba .... share away, back up and running .... NOT
> 
> Doing a bit-for-bit copy of the contents of the saved tree to the local 
> drive made the world well again !
> 
> So, after too much time spent messing with this I came across some cywin 
> docs that spoke about the change of CR-LF/LF semantics depending of 
> where the file is being mounted (google is your friend).  Somehow, 
> cygwin automagically knows you're on some samba share and uses unix 
> style semantics for repositories in that share.  Just think of what mess 
> you could generate with this kind of setup !
>