22. Catch signals for cleanup when "add"ing files. 24. Insist on a log message. (If done, this should be configurable via commitinfo or some new config file -kingdon, Jun 1995). 30. Add "patch" program option to the modules database. 31. Think hard about ^C recovery. 38. Think hard about using RCS state information to allow one to checkin a new vendor release without having it be accessed until it has been integrated into the local changes. 39. Think about a version of "cvs update -j" which remembers what from that other branch is already merged. This has pitfalls--it could easily lead to invisible state which could confuse users very rapidly--but having to create a tag or some such mechanism to keep track of what has been merged is a pain. 45. Consider enhancing the "rdiff" and "tag" (rtag??) command support in the module database -- they seem hard to use since these commands deal directly with the RCS ,v files. 49. cvs xxx commands should be able to deal with files in other directories. I want to do a cvs add foo/bar.c. [[ most commands now use the generic recursion processor, but not all; this note is left here to remind me to fix the others ]] 52. SCCS has a feature that I would *love* to see in CVS, as it is very useful. One may make a private copy of SCCS suid to a particular user, so other users in the authentication list may check files in and out of a project directory without mucking about with groups. Is there any plan to provide a similar functionality to CVS? Our site (and, I'd imagine, many other sites with large user bases) has decided against having the user-groups feature of unix available to the users, due to perceived administrative, technical and performance headaches. A tool such as CVS with features that provide group-like functionality would be a huge help. 62. Consider using revision controlled files and directories to handle the new module format -- consider a cvs command front-end to add/delete/modify module contents, maybe. 63. The "import" and vendor support commands (co -j) need to be documented better. 64. Need to greatly increase the performance of an initial checkout. [[ it got better, then we added functionality, making it worse again ]] 66. Length of the CVS temporary files must be limited to 14 characters for System-V stupid support. As well as the length on the CVS.adm files. 72. Consider re-design of the module -o, -i, -t options to use the file system more intuitively. 73. Consider an option (in .cvsrc?) to automatically add files that are new and specified to commit. 79. Might be nice to have some sort of interface to TFS and tagged revisions. 82. Maybe the import stuff should allow an arbitrary revision to be specified. 84. Improve the documentation about administration of the repository and how to add/remove files and the use of symbolic links. 85. Add revision controlled symbolic links to CVS using one of the tag fields in the RCS file. 92. Look into this: After a bit of soul searching via dbx, I realized my sin was that I'd specified "echo" as the program to call from loginfo. The commit procedure worked fine till it hit my echo, then silently aborted leaving the lockfiles intact. Since I needn't use the loginfo facility, I simply removed those commands and it all works. 93. Need to think hard about release and development environments. Think about execsets as well. 98. If diff3 bombs out (too many differences) cvs then thinks that the file has been updated and is OK to be commited even though the file has not yet been merged. 100. Checked out files should have revision control support. Maybe. 102. Perhaps directory modes should be propagated on all import check-ins. Not necessarily uid/gid changes. 103. setuid/setgid on files is suspect. 104. cvs should recover nicely on unreadable files/directories. 105. cvs should have administrative tools to allow for changing permissions and modes and what not. In particular, this would make cvs a more attractive alternative to rdist. 107. It should be possible to specify a list of symbolic revisions to checkout such that the list is processed in reverse order looking for matches within the RCS file for the symbolic revision. If there is not a match, the next symbolic rev on the list is checked, and so on, until all symbolic revs are exhausted. This would allow one to, say, checkout "4.0" + "4.0.3" + "4.0.3Patch1" + "4.0.3Patch2" to get the most recent 4.x stuff. This is usually handled by just specifying the right release_tag, but most people forget to do this. 108. If someone creates a whole new directory (i.e. adds it to the cvs repository) and you happen to have a directory in your source farm by the same name, when you do your cvs update -d it SILENTLY does *nothing* to that directory. At least, I think it was silent; certainly, it did *not* abort my cvs update, as it would have if the same thing had happened with a file instead of a directory. 109. I had gotten pieces of the sys directory in the past but not a complete tree. I just did something like: cvs get * Where sys was in * and got the message cvs get: Executing 'sys/tools/make_links sys' sh: sys/tools/make_links: not found I suspect this is because I didn't have the file in question, but I do not understand how I could fool it into getting an error. I think a later cvs get sys seemed to work so perhaps something is amiss in handling multiple arguments to cvs get? 113. The "cvs update" command should tee its output to a log file in ".". (why? What is wrong with piping stdout to "tee"? -kingdon, Jun 1995) 119. Consider an option to have import checkout the RCS or SCCS files if necessary. (this is if someone want to import something which is in RCS or SCCS without preserving the history, but making sure they do get the latest versions. It isn't clear to me how useful that is -kingdon, June 1996). 122. If Name_Repository fails, it currently causes CVS to die completely. It should instead return NULL and have the caller do something reasonable (??? -what is reasonable? I'm not sure there is a real problem here. -kingdon, June 1996). 123. Add a flag to import to not build vendor branches for local code. 124. Anyway, I thought you might want to add something like the following to the cvs man pages: BUGS The sum of the sizes of a module key and its contents are limited. See ndbm(3). 126. Do an analysis to see if CVS is forgetting to close file descriptors. Especially when committing many files (more than the open file limit for the particular UNIX). 127. Look at *info files; they should all be quiet if the files are not there. Should be able to point at a RCS directory and go. 128. When I tag a file, the message tells me that I'm tagging a directory. 130. cvs diff with no -r arguments does not need to look up the current RCS version number since it only cares about what's in the Entries file. This should make it much faster. It should ParseEntries itself and access the entries list much like Version_TS does (sticky tags and sticky options may need to be supported here as well). Then it should only diff the things that have the wrong time stamp (the ones that look modified). 134. Make a statement about using hard NFS mounts to your source repository. Look into checking NULL fgets() returns with ferror() to see if an error had occurred. (we should be checking for errors, quite aside from NFS issues -kingdon, June 1996). 137. Some sites might want CVS to fsync() the RCS ,v file to protect against nasty hardware errors. There is a slight performance hit with doing so, though, so it should be configurable in the .cvsrc file. Also, along with this, we should look at the places where CVS itself could be a little more synchronous so as not to lose data. [[ I've done some of this, but it could use much more ]] 138. Some people have suggested that CVS use a VPATH-like environment variable to limit the amount of sources that need to be duplicated for sites with giant source trees and no disk space. 141. Import should accept modules as its directory argument. 143. Update the documentation to show that the source repository is something far away from the files that you work on. 144. Have cvs checkout look for the environment variable CVSPREFIX (or CVSMODPREFIX or some such). If it's set, then when looking up an alias in the modules database, first look it up with the value of CVSPREFIX attached, and then look for the alias itself. This would be useful when you have several projects in a single repository. You could have aliases abc_src and xyz_src and tell people working on project abc to put "setenv CVSPREFIX abc_" in their .cshrc file (or equivalent for other shells). Then they could do "cvs co src" to get a copy of their src directory, not xyz's. (This should create a directory called src, not abc_src.) 145. After you create revision 1.1.1.1 in the previous scenario, if you do "cvs update -r1 filename" you get revision 1.1, not 1.1.1.1. It would be nice to get the later revision. Again, this restriction comes from RCS and is probably hard to change in CVS. Sigh. |"cvs update -r1 filename" does not tell RCS to follow any branches. CVS |tries to be consistent with RCS in this fashion, so I would not change |this. Within CVS we do have the flexibility of extending things, like |making a revision of the form "-r1HEAD" find the most recent revision |(branch or not) with a "1." prefix in the RCS file. This would get what |you want maybe. This would be very useful. Though I would prefer an option such as "-v1" rather than "-r1HEAD". This option might be used quite often. 146. The merging of files should be controlled via a hook so that programs other than "rcsmerge" can be used, like Sun's filemerge or emacs's emerge.el. (but be careful in making this work client/server--it means doing the interactive merging at the end after the server is done). (probably best is to have CVS do the non-interactive part and tell the user about where the files are (.#foo.c.working and .#foo.c.1.5 or whatever), so they can do the interactive part at that point -kingdon, June 1996). 149. On Sun, 2 Feb 92 22:01:38 EST, rouilj@dl5000.bc.edu (John P. Rouillard) said: Maybe there should be an option to cvs admin that allows a user to change the Repository file with some degree of error checking? Something like "cvs admin reposmv /old/path /new/pretty/path". Before it does the replace it check to see that the files /new/pretty/path// exist. 150. I have a customer request for a way to specify log message per file, non-interactively before the commit, such that a single, fully recursive commit prompts for one commit message, and concatenates the per file messages for each file. In short, one commit, one editor session, log messages allowed to vary across files within the commit. Also, the per file messages should be allowed to be written when the files are changed, which may predate the commit considerably. A new command seems appropriate for this. The state can be saved in the CVS directory. I.e., % cvs msg foo.c Enter log message for foo.c >> fixed an uninitialized variable >> ^D The text is saved as CVS/foo.c,m (or some such name) and commit is modified to append (prepend?) the text (if found) to the log message specified at commit time. Easy enough. (having cvs commit be non-interactive takes care of various issues like whether to connect to the server before or after prompting for a message -kingdon, June 1996) 151. Also, is there a flag I am missing that allows replacing Ulrtx_Build by Ultrix_build? I.E. I would like a tag replacement to be a one step operation rather than a two step "cvs rtag -r Ulrtx_Build Ultrix_Build" followed by "cvs trag -d Ulrtx_Build" 152. The "cvs -n" option does not work as one would expect for all the commands. In particular, for "commit" and "import", where one would also like to see what it would do, without actually doing anything. 153. There should be some command (maybe I just haven't figured out which one...) to import a source directory which is already RCS-administered without losing all prior RCS gathered data. Thus, it would have to examine the RCS files and choose a starting version and branch higher than previous ones used. 154. When committing the modules file, a pre-commit check should be done to verify the validity of the new modules file before allowing it to be committed. 155. The options for "cvs history" are mutually exclusive, even though useful queries can be done if they are not, as in specifying both a module and a tag. A workaround is to specify the module, then run the output through grep to only display lines that begin with T, which are tag lines. 156. Also, how hard would it be to allow continuation lines in the {commit,rcs,log}info files? It would probably be useful with all of the various flags that are now available, or if somebody has a lot of files to put into a module. 158. If I do a recursive commit and find that the same RCS file is checked out (and modified!) in two different places within my checked-out files (but within the realm of a single "commit"), CVS will commit the first change, then overwrite that change with the second change. We should catch this (typically unusual) case and issue an appropriate diagnostic and die. 160. The checks that the commit command does should be extended to make sure that the revision that we will lock is not already locked by someone else. Maybe it should also lock the new revision if the old revision was already locked by the user as well, thus moving the lock forward after the commit. 161. The date parser included with CVS (lib/getdate.y) does not support such RCS-supported dates as "1992/03/07". It probably should. 163. The rtag/tag commands should have an option that removes the specified tag from any file that is in the attic. This allows one to re-use a tag (like "Mon", "Tue", ...) all the time and still have it tag the real main-line code. 165. The "import" command will create RCS files automatically, but will screw-up when trying to create long file names on short file name file systems. Perhaps import should be a bit more cautious. 166. There really needs to be a "Getting Started" document which describes some of the new CVS philosophies. Folks coming straight from SCCS or RCS might be confused by "cvs import". Also need to explain: - How one might setup their $CVSROOT - What all the tags mean in an "import" command - Tags are important; revision numbers are not 170. Is there an "info" file that can be invoked when a file is checked out, or updated ? What I want to do is to advise users, particularly novices, of the state of their working source whenever they check something out, as a sanity check. For example, I've written a perl script which tells you what branch you're on, if any. Hopefully this will help guard against mistaken checkins to the trunk, or to the wrong branch. I suppose I can do this in "commitinfo", but it'd be nice to advise people before they edit their files. It would also be nice if there was some sort of "verboseness" switch to the checkout and update commands that could turn this invocation of the script off, for mature users. 173. We have a tagged branch in CVS. How do we get the version of that branch (for an entire directory) that corresponds to the files on that branch on a certain day? I'd like to specify BOTH -r and -D to 'cvs checkout', but I can't. It looks like I can only specify the date for the main line (as opposed to any branches). True? Any workarounds to get what I need? 174. I would like to see "cvs release" modified so that it only removes files which are known to CVS - all the files in the repository, plus those which are listed in .cvsignore. This way, if you do leave something valuable in a source tree you can "cvs release -d" the tree and your non-CVS goodies are still there. If a user is going to leave non-CVS files in their source trees, they really should have to clean them up by hand. 175. And, in the feature request department, I'd dearly love a command-line interface to adding a new module to the CVSROOT/modules file. 176. If you use the -i flag in the modules file, you can control access to source code; this is a Good Thing under certain circumstances. I just had a nasty thought, and on experiment discovered that the filter specified by -i is _not_ run before a cvs admin command; as this allows a user to go behind cvs's back and delete information (cvs admin -o1.4 file) this seems like a serious problem. 177. We've got some external vendor source that sits under a source code hierarchy, and when we do a cvs update, it gets wiped out because its tag is different from the "main" distribution. I've tried to use "-I" to ignore the directory, as well as .cvsignore, but this doesn't work. 179. "cvs admin" does not log its actions with loginfo, nor does it check whether the action is allowed with commitinfo. It should. 180. "cvs edit" should show you who is already editing the files, probably (that is, do "cvs editors" before executing, or some similar result). (But watch out for what happens if the network is down!). 181. Make a "cvs message" command which prompts for a log message and stores it in the CVS directory. Then "cvs ci" would use it. This solves the problem with where in the client to prompt for the log message (see comment in commit.c at call to start_server), allows users more flexibility in specifying messages per-directory ("cvs message -l") or per-tree ("cvs message") or per-file ("cvs message foo.c"), and fixes the incompatibility between client/server (per-tree) and non-client/server (per-directory). 182. There should be a way to show log entries corresponding to changes from tag "foo" to tag "bar". "cvs log -rfoo -rbar" doesn't cut it, because it is inclusive on the bar end. I'm not sure that is ever a useful or logical behavior ("cvs diff -r foo -r bar" is not similarly inclusive), but is compatibility an issue? 183. "cvs status" should report on Entries.Static flag and CVS/Tag (how? maybe a "cvs status -d" to give directory status?). There should also be more documentation of how these get set and how/when to re-set them. 184. Would be nice to implement the FreeBSD MD5-based password hash algorithm in pserver. For more info see "6.1. DES, MD5, and Crypt" in the FreeBSD Handbook, and src/lib/libcrypt/crypt.c in the FreeBSD sources. Certainly in the context of non-unix servers this algorithm makes more sense than the traditional unix crypt() algorithm, which suffers from export control problems.