Re: Checksums on versions

[Marshall, Joshua]

>> I've been asked to investigate a way to get assurance that the data 
that 
>> is checked out of CVS (and updates too) is the data that was checked 
into 
>> CVS.

> Why?  That's what CVS *does*!  If it didn't, it wouldn't be of any use
> to anyone.

The investigation I have had shows that the client / server protocol has 
the option for Checksums to be set (I read the protocol for 1.9 [1] 
because I couldn't find 1.11) but it says that it is optional. Is there a 
way to tell whether this is actually being used? 

I looked through the file in the repository (the ,v file) and can't see 
any references to checksums etc being in there. I found a webpage [2] 
which stated that there aren't any checksums done on the files. Although 
what it says is true about backups being long gone if file corruption is 
detected, it would be very useful for the developers to know if a file is 
corrupted, and at least know that what they have isn't exactly what was 
committed.

Is there a way to get an external program to checksum these files and 
store a checksum somewhere so that they can be checked when they are 
pulled out of the repository for validity - and is there a way to do this 
automatically?

Regards,

Joshua Marshall

[1] 
http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/pdp/ose/asis/products/GNU.DVP/cvs-1.9/cvsclient_6.html
[2] http://www.cvshome.org/cyclic/cvs/devideas.html