cvs problems ...

[Christopher Faylor]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 09:55:44AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote:
>On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 09:48, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>Ok.  I have just zeroed every fileattr file in the gcc repository.
>>
>Thanks.
>
>>Maybe I should write a cron job to do that occasionally so that these
>>types of problems will be "fixed" eventually without human
>>intervention.
>>
>Sounds like a convenient workaround.  Does anyone know what the actual
>bug is?  Any chance that this is being fixed in newer versions of CVS?

The bug is caused by the special mods that we have in CVS which speed up
operations on the trunk.  A separate "cache" (called fileattr) file is
created which contains version information for all files in a directory.
In certain pathological conditions, this file can occasionally become
out of date wrt to the files it references.

This patch isn't in standard CVS and, IIRC, has been rejected in the
past.  It needs more work before it would be accepted (it probably needs
to work on branches and it shouldn't be having the types of problems
that it has now) and I don't think anyone is interested in spending the
time to get it into shape for submission.

The speedup from this patch is dramatic, so for projects like gcc, I
think it makes sense to keep using it, even given the occasional
glitches.

cgf