[cvsnt] Re: Does CVS support Linked files?

Arthur Barrett arthur.barrett at march-hare.com
Sun Oct 23 23:32:39 BST 2005


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Brian,

Please see Bo's earlier e-mail with an excellent explanation of what you
can and cannot do with a Modules(2).

What I can offer is a suggestion of a slightly different way of thinking
about your current revision history.

If the WEB and RAA projects share a common past origin then the best way
to version them is through branches (which is a concept that VSS does
not have so you perhaps have not thought of it before).

For the sake of my example I am going to assume that in the distant past
WEB was written, and recently you needed to customise it and created RAA
- most of the files in the project changed - but not Test/Web/common.asp
- which is identical in the two projects.

So instead of importing two projects into CVSNT and versioning both WEB
and RAA - import only WEB (at a date prior to starting the RAA project).

Now create a branch (or a magic branch) called RAA and import the newer
"modified" files into the branch RAA.

RAA can now evolve separately to WEB - but files that are unchanged in
RAA will be identical to the WEB project files.  This allows you to make
a change in RAA or in WEB and then merge the same change in to the other
project even though the two may have other changes that are different.
To maintain / modify the RAA project use a work area / sandbox created
from the RAA branch and to maintain / modify the WEB project use the
trunk.

The final thing is to checkout the "shadow folders" using two names, ie:
Cvs -r co -d test/web web
Cvs -r co -b RAA -d test/raa web

My explanation is a little short of detail - but hopefully it gives you
an alternative.

To answer your earlier question about symbolically linking the ,v files
on the Linux repository server - the answer is this would work until it
broke or until you upgraded to 2.6.  The CVS Lock server would not
realise that the two symbolically linked files were the same actual file
and alllow simultaneous writes to the two files therefore trashing the
history.  CVSNT 2.6 will use a partial database backend which would also
destroy this method.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett



-----Original Message-----
From: cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org [mailto:cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org] On Behalf
Of Brian Post
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 8:53 AM
To: cvsnt at cvsnt.org
Subject: [cvsnt] Re: Does CVS support Linked files?


Would changing my CVS server to a linux box & using file system hard or
soft 
file links in the server tree solve the problem of shared files.

Unfortunatley I don't have the luxury of moving the files into a common 
folder as per my example of WEB & RAA modules as these form a pair of 
Localhost web projects which share some common files & others some have 
their own specific changes.

Cheers, Brian 


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