Serious problems accessing cvs

[Phil Edwards]

Jeffrey A Law writes:
>   In message < 200003072123.WAA01557@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de >you write:
>   > I'm not entirely certain about that. I notice that updating works
>   > quite well when I have no local changes. As soon as it starts merging
>   > at the other end, it won't come back. I then kill the update, restart
>   > it again, and it sometimes succeeds with the first file to merge, then
>   > hangs again.
> The more local changes you have, the more data that has to be moved across
> the wire.  For each file you change, assume that a copy of it has to be
> moved across the net at least once, possibly twice (I'm not a CVS expert, I
> can only report what I see in practice).

I would /highly/ recommend using or adopting local tools like what Mike
Stump talked about.  Personally, since my connection to the net is often
beaten down to a 300 baud accoustic coupler made out of tree bark and
animal skins, I do:

   - a checkout or update
   - copy the directory tree
   - hack on the copy
   - do a diff between the trees and save it to a file
   - edit the file to make certain I'm not patching anything I shouldn't
   - apply the patch to the "real" local tree
   - do the CVS work inside the real tree, restricted to the list of
     files in the diff

This obviates a lot of the need for "cvs diff" and "cvs -n update"
and the like.  Much of this (all of it?) is already in the web pages
as recommended practice.  Always specifying a list of files/dirs to
work on instead of defaulting to everything has a sizeable speedup on
my CVS checkins.  In the work I do, there isn't a lot of merging, so I
can't report any experience there.

Phil