path: root/contrib/cvs/TODO

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/<dir>/<files> 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 message 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 (see comment in commit.c at call to start_server)
     -kingdon, June 1996)

     I'm not sure about the part above about having commit prompt
     for an overall message--part of the point is having commit
     non-interactive and somehow combining messages seems like (excess?)
     hair.

     Would be nice to do this so it 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).

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!).

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.

185.  A frequent complaint is that keyword expansion causes conflicts
when merging from one branch to another.  The first step is
documenting CVS's existing features in this area--what happens with
various -k options in various places?  The second step is thinking
about whether there should be some new feature and if so how it should
be designed.  For example, here is one thought:

    rcs' co command needs a new -k option.  The new option should expand
    $Log entries without expanding $Revision entries.  This would
    allow cvs to use rcsmerge in such a way that joining branches into
    main lines would neither generate extra collisions on revisions nor
    drop log lines.

The details of this are out of date (CVS no longer invokes "co", and
any changes in this area would be done by bypassing RCS rather than
modifying it), but even as to the general idea, I don't have a clear
idea about whether it would be good (see what I mean about the need
for better documentation?  I work on CVS full-time, and even I don't
understand the state of the art on this subject).