Re: Proposing a tiny change

Adrian didn't quite get the complete story out, but his last post was pretty close. David> Maybe it's me that isn't understanding. If I checkout the David> source tree using "-r r21-5-latest-beta" today I get 21-5-3 David> (unless it changed last night). That's correct and it hasn't changed. David> Am I guarenteed that there will be *no* changes applied David> until you announce a 21-5-4? Yes, in the following sense. When I do a release, I commit everything in the workspace. I do a cvs tag operation based on the revisions in my workspace with the r21-5-4 tag. I then do a cvs rtag operation that moves the r21-5-latest-beta from r21-5-3 (which stays the same) to r21-5-4. This means that if you use the tag, you can not see any commits that take place after my "canonical commit". David> That I will *never* need to do cvs update until there is a David> new beta? There are two exceptions. (1) A patch you really want was committed to the tip of the trunk. Then you use the -A flag to clear all tags and get the trunk. This is hazardous, because of "atomicity" issues and because people often commit stuff that isn't quite right. The real solution is for me/us to get off our duffs and release more frequently. We're aware of the problem and we're working on it. (2) CVS commits are not "atomic." This means that it is possible that while I am doing the tag operation, you start an update. Then it is very possible that you will be updating in a r21-5-3 directory, while I am tagging the files in another to be r21-5-4. In that case, doing an update with r21-5-latest-beta will get you a mixed checkout, very bad juju. This should be extremely rare. You can check it by waiting a few minutes and doing a second update or a cvs diff using the same tag. In fact, my release scripts do exactly that: repeatedly check out until no change is detected. David> If the last two statements above are *not* true, then I'm David> asking for a finer grained indication that I could feedback David> so y'all know precisely what source I'm working with when I David> report a problem. If you are using a tag, then we know exactly what you got from your Installation file. David> In the past I thought I had seen "cvs update -r David> r21-5-latest-beta" report some updates. Only if your updates bracketed a release, or the first update was interrupted and somehow incomplete. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.