Re: Checksums on versions

[Mike Castle]

In article <200201101814.NAA23575@thor.sdrc.com>,
Larry Jones <larry.jones@sdrc.com> wrote:
>> 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?
>
>Not without an inordinate amount of work -- what is the higher-level
>goal that you're trying to accomplish?

Just to compare against another RCS based SCM system, Perforce, which does
have this type of feature.

RCS files have been known to get corrupted from time to time.  Perhaps bugs
in the OS, perhaps bugs in CVS.

But, I don't think such tools need to be a part of CVS (unless maybe as a
contrib).

One technique would be to have a regular job that loops over all files in
the repository, check out each version, and keep an md5sum of the version
in a database some where.  If an md5sum already exists, compare to make
sure it's still valid.  If not, you know some corruption occured somewhere,
and can take appropriate actions.

mrc
-- 
     Mike Castle      dalgoda@ix.netcom.com      www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different"); -- gcc