[cvsnt] Re: Best way to check out missing subdir?

[Gerhard Fiedler]

Glen Starrett wrote:

> Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> All situations where the feature is helpful, and it being client-side is
>> appropriate. (In all cases it is a decision of the sandbox owner, not
>> the repository admin, what to get and what not.)
> 
> Sounds reasonable.  It's more dynamic than I thought from your initial 
> description as well -- changing it after the initial checkout just for 
> awhile, then removing it.  Sort of 'freezing' portions of your sandbox 
> without updating to a sticky tag.

This could actually be a way to do this quite a bit smarter (simpler, and
compatible with GUI tools) than I thought. For already checked out files,
tagging them with a (temporary) tag and making it sticky has the same
effect as the VSS "cloaking": it "freezes" that part. Removing the freeze
would be to run a "cvs up -A" and then delete the temporary tag. 

To completely avoid checkout, maybe something like this would do it:

  md dirToCloak
  cvs add dirToCloak
  cvs up -r inexistentTag dirToCloak

Would that work (given that inexistentTag does not exist)? An "up -d" in a
parent directory doesn't change the sticky tag, so it should continue not
getting anything in and under dirToCloak. Hm... this looks like a winner.
Removal of the freeze would be to simply run a "cvs up -A". The tag itself
never existed.

Seems this just needs a (best repository-wide) convention about such
temporary tags, to be able to create a tag that is guaranteed to not exist.
That's not difficult. And a client-side script that handles the dirty work
:)

> Thanks for the insights. 

Ditto :)


> Anyone else have an opinion on this vs. other ideas on updates and
> sandbox management?  If there was a way to combine this type of 'freeze'
> with something to ignore bin directories until a release, that could be
> helpful.  A 'freeze' status with an override on ci, tag or a freeze
> enable|disable that helps manage the 'sometimes' committed files. 

Isn't the file flag 's' [1] what you're looking for? Together with "cvs ci
-f"?

[1] http://www.cvsnt.org/manual/html/Substitution-modes.html

BTW, how is this 's' called? It's not a substitution mode, I guess, even
though it's on the substitution mode page. "File flag" sounds a bit, hm...
imprecise. I also read "k option"... more precise, but not "nice" :)

Gerhard