Some Real Life Problems (With Solutions)

All of these situations are ones I've encountered in my real-life adventures as a CVS troubleshooter (plus a few items that are not really problems, just questions that I've heard asked so often that they may as well be answered here). The list is meant to be fairly comprehensive, and it may repeat material you've seen in earlier chapters.

The situations are listed according to how frequently they seem to arise, with the most common ones first.

• CVS says it is waiting for a lock; what does that mean?
• CVS claims a file is failing Up-To-Date check; what do I do?
• The pserver access method is not working
• The pserver access method is STILL not working
• My commits seem to happen in pieces instead of atomically
• CVS keeps changing file permissions; why does it do that?
• CVS on Windows complains it cannot find my .cvspass file; why?
• My working copy is on several different branches; help?
• When I do export -d I sometimes miss recent commits
• I get an error about val-tags; what should I do?
• I am having problems with sticky tags; how do I get rid of them?
• Checkouts/updates exit with error saying cannot expand modules
• I cannot seem to turn off watches
• My binary files are messed up
• CVS is not doing line-end conversion correctly
• I need to remove a subdirectory in my project; how do I do it?
• Can I copy .cvspass files or portions of them?
• I just committed some files with the wrong log message
• I need to move files around without losing revision history
• How can I get a list of all tags in a project?
• How can I get a list of all projects in a repository?
• Some commands fail remotely but not locally; how should I debug?
• I do not see my problem covered in this chapter
• I think I have discovered a bug in CVS; what do I do?
• I have implemented a new feature for CVS; to whom do I send it?
• How can I keep up with changes to CVS?