[cvsnt] Manually renaming files

[Gavin Kinsey]

Bo Berglund wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2002 16:16:01 +0100, "Gavin Kinsey"
> <gavin.kinsey at accutest.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have a rare opportunity tommorrow to access the machine the cvsnt is
>>running on and am going to use the opportunity to upgrade to the latest
>>version.
>>
>>I would also like to fix some of the wrongly named (mainly ones with spaces
>>in) and positioned files.  I know the only way to do this while retaining
>>revision histories is manual edits, my question is.  Is it as simple as
>>moving/renaming the files in the repository or do any files need to be
>>altered (something like Entries files)?
> 
> You have to be a bit careful with this....
> First of all, think again!
> It might be better to retire the entire module as a backup and instead
> export the head revision to a sandbox (export means that the CVS
> subdirs do not get created). Then cvs import this state after making
> the naming adjustments to a new module that is going to be the one you
> continue to work on. This way you can go back to the old module if
> need be and check out a working tagged copy.
> All this can be done from the client side too)

Still, this will lose the revision history of the files.  I would 
consider this if there were many files that needed changing but for the 
few I need to do I think a manual edit is the best way.

> Bu, if you are still going to rename modules (=directories) or files
> within modules you have to be sure that *noone* has any files checked
> out when you do this.
 >
> So you must tell everybody to commit all of their edits and abandon
> their sandboxes totally.

I have made sure of this anyway as the CVSROOT settings are changing 
(and I don't trust most people to use the macro that changes CVSROOT in 
the checked out files properly).

> Then you can edit the directory and file names in the repository after
> which the developers have to check out their working copies again to
> fresh sandboxes.
> While you do the renaming you must of course shuit down the CVSNT
> service so noone can come in while you work...

Yep, have to do that too as am upgrading the server.  So I will shut off 
the old server, make a complete backup of the repository (just in case) 
then edit all the filenames, there are only about 40 files that need 
changing.  Then, finally, install the latest version of cvsnt.


> This covers one aspect of the job, but you may well see that the final
> result is not that great after all. It all depends on the structure of
> your files. If like me you are storing multifile software projects
> chances are that project files and makefiles will break when you do
> this, files mentioned in them are no longer available and if you check
> out old revisions on tags the source can no longer be built
> successfully.

It's okay, these files are all checked in by non-programmers, which may 
be why they didn't follow the naming rules I told them to :-).  They are 
the support files for the projects, specification documents mainly and 
there are no dependancies on them as far as I can tell.