Re: How I repaired my repository

[Eric Siegerman]

Glad to hear you've recovered!

On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 11:11:37AM -0700, Mike Ayers wrote:
>       That's it.  This is basically the method suggested by Eric Siegerman 
> with a few modifications.

Yup, pretty much the same modifications I'd have made :-)


> $ find . -type f | grep -v '/CVS/' | sed 's/^/\"/' | sed 's/$/\"/' |
> xargs rm
> 
> (the sed scripts enclose the filename in quotes to handle paths with
> spaces in them, which I had)

You can do both of those in one sed script with:
        ... | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | ...
Though I'd use single quotes instead:
        ... | sed "s/.*/'&'/" | ...
to protect against other shell-sensitive characters that aren't
disabled by double quotes -- '$' for example.

Even better is to use GNU find and xargs, both of which are parts
of their findutils package, since those provide a way to
completely avoid the problem:
        find DIRS -CRITERIA -print0 | xargs -0 COMMAND
That separates the pathnames with '\0's instead of newlines, and
causes xargs to look for same.


>       6.  Do a `cvs update` on the restored sandbox.  This should reduce the 
> differences to the files which are actually different,
> and mark those files commitable.

Hmm, I'd have done a "cvs -n update" first, looking for anything
unusual, i.e. other than "M" and "?" lines, before trusting a
"real" update not to make a mess:
  - If there are files reported as "lost", you need to
    "cvs remove" them

  - There shouldn't be any conflicts, given the situation, but if
    there are, this is a case where CVS's automatic merge will
    NOT do the right thing.

  - Likewise any files reported as "U" but not as "lost".  Again,
    this shouldn't occur -- which is why I *really* want to know
    if it does!

Think of this sanity checking as the manual equivalent of
assert()'s :-)


>       8.  Now step through your archives and find all the directories which 
> do not exist in the restored repository and should.
> I do not know how to do this on the command line, as I am using
> WinCVS, which makes this step quite easy.

You can do this iteratively using CVS:
  - do "cvs -nq update" and look for the "?" lines
  - "cvs add" those
  - repeat until there aren't any more "?"s

You can't reduce it to a single pipeline per pass:
        cvs -nq update | sed 'some magic or other' | xargs cvs add
That doesn't work, especially in client/server mode, if the files
being added are in multiple directories.  (Rather, it used not to
work; maybe it does now...)

The multiple passes are because, if a directory is new, its
contents won't show up as "?" lines until you've "cvs add"ed the
directory itself.


> Optionally, tag them as well.

I wouldn't consider this optional, but that's personal preference
of course :-)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
Anyone who swims with the current will reach the big music steamship;
whoever swims against the current will perhaps reach the source.
        - Paul Schneider-Esleben