[cvsnt] Bad upgrade experience to current CVSNT 2.50.3 (2260)

[John Peacock]

I finally got around to upgrading my main CVSNT server to a more recent 
release (from something in the 2.0.x range), and I thought I'd document 
the bloodshed involved.

1) The installer does not include a required DLL (dbghlp.dll) and there 
is no mention I can find on the CVSNT website regarding where to get it. 
  Unfortunately for me, I am running a Windows NT4 SP6a server and I 
didn't have a copy of this.  I was able to find an old copy on M$loth's 
website (which had a missing entry point error), but in the end I wound 
up downloading a more recent copy from some random site on the web. 
Please put this redistributable file back into the installer, since the 
code is BORKEN without it.  Alternatively, you the CVSNT code could not 
die screaming if this wasn't present.

2) My postcommit hook failed to run; after correcting the backslash to 
forwardslash issue, all I would get was "Script failed" and nothing 
else.  It turns out that I had to prepend "perl" to my postcommit script 
line because how CVSNT is executing this no longer uses the CMD mapping 
between .PL files and the Perl executable.

3) The "shadow" feature either doesn't work as advertised or the 
documentation does not reflect reality.  A simple line like this:

^websites/Home HEAD W:/websites/Home

does not, in fact, update that path on the disk.  Even though I enabled 
the shadow plugin, stopped/started the server, and set the "Verbose 
output" option, I got no output at all (and no updates either).

4) Whoever decided that "postcommand" is a suitable replacement for 
"postcommit" never tried to use it to update a checked out copy. 
Suprise, surprise, once I got this working it started spawning CMD boxes 
until I had to reboot the server to get it to stop.  It seems that the 
act of updating a working copy from the server constitutes a "command" 
and hence *every time* it would update, it would start yet another 
postcommand script.  Dumb, dumb, dumb design.  The documentation should 
come with a BIG WARNING not to use this for keeping a working copy up to 
date!

Can't wait until I move to Subversion... :(

John