[cvsnt] restoring a repository: revision collision

Friedrich Niederreiter friedrichniederreiter at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 17 09:02:45 GMT 2005


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Hello,

we are in the process of developing a strategy for
restoring repositories in case of accidents. We came
across the following (disturbing) case:

UserA has worked on a file the whole morning creating
new revisions 1.42 and 1.43. The nightly backup of the
repository only contained rev 1.41 in the HEAD.
Because of a hardware failuer we then are forced to
restore the repository (containing 1.41 as HEAD).
UserA then cannot commit his/her local modifications
to the BASE 1.43 (thus trying to create 1.44) because
1.43 doesnt exist. CVS gives back the warning "could
not find desired version 1.43". So fine so good.

Lets assume that after the crash UserB started working
on the same file and thus created two revisions 1.42
and 1.43. UserA went home after the hardware crash and
thus doesnt know anything about UserB also midfying
the file. The next morning UserA is able to commit his
locally modified file without a problem where UserB's
modifications are totally eradicated: no
merge/conflict detection seems takes place.

My questions:
1. What good are the date/time stamp in the file
CVS\Entries. It seemd that only the BASE revision
number was used to check the repository, but not the
timestamp.
2. How do the experts handle a repository restoration?
There might be 'hundreds' of sandboxes on various
machines and the potential of overwriting somebody
elses changes (not having a merge) can be a big
problem. The overwriter can only be aware of such a
problem if he does a diff after the commit (but why
should he?)

Thanks alot.

Friedrich Niederreiter


PS: Client (Win2000Prof) & Server (Win2000Prof)
running 2.0.41 with Tortoise 1.6.5 over SSH
  




		
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