Re: strange "it is in the way" message

[Doug Lee]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 09:04:44AM -0400, Jim.Hyslop wrote:
> Lars Huttar wrote:
> > On a Windows 2000 server, I'm running 
> >    cvs.exe update -d -P -C
> ...
> > test server. But for every file that already exists on the test
> > server, I get the error,
> > 
> >   cvs update: move away 
> > cocoon/mount/data-server/sources/BPPP.xsp; it is in the way
> >   C cocoon/mount/data-server/sources/BPPP.xsp
> > 
> > For every file! Whether modified (locally or on the CVS 
> > server) or not.
> 
> > And most importantly, files that have been modified on other
> > machines and committed to the CVS server do not get updated
> > (regardless of whether they were modified on the test server).
> Now that's really strange.
> 
> What platform and CVS version is your repository? What's your connection
> method?

I've seen this kind of thing when the CVS server is a Unix variant,
the client is in Windows, and the client's CVS\entries file contains
file names in a different case than the actual names on the Unix host.
The solution for me has always been to manually edit the CVS\entries
file on the client and make the case match the Unix host's case for
each name--which is, of course, a pain, so I wrote about that issue in
a separate thread on this list recently.

My explanation, right or wrong, is this:  I believe the co/update
command tries to retrieve the file with the case shown in CVS\entries
AND gets told by the Unix host that there's this new file with the
same name in a different case.  The first of these succeeds in
matching the file also, because CVS translates the case for the
transit between operating systems (surely not a precise description of
what happens there)... so the upshot is that CVS tries to get the file
twice, and the second retrieval collides with the file already gotten
and produces the "it is in the way" message.

-- 
Doug Lee           address@hidden        http://www.dlee.org
Bartimaeus Group   address@hidden   http://www.bartsite.com
"It's not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish
it after the age of six." --John W. Gardner and Francesca Gardner Reese