Context: Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.10.8 (client/server) Platform: Red Hat Linux 6.1 This may be a bug or simply the result of unclear documentation, but I unexpectedly found that cvs tried to use the wrong repository in the following circumstances: (Note, the development environment I use has two distinct source repositories containing disjoint sources.) If cvs (in this case, "cvs diff foodir/foo.c") is run in an environment where a) the current working directory has no CVS directory defined (and therefore no CVS/Root), but .. b) the target source file (foo.c) on which cvs is operating is in another directory (foodir) which DOES have a CVS directory defined, with the correct Root (CVS/Root) information defined, and .. c) the CVSROOT environment variable specifies a different Root, and .. d) -d option is NOT specified, then cvs attempts to use the (incorrect) Root specified in $CVSROOT and ignores the information in the CVS/Root file of the directory in which the source resides. If CVSROOT is unset, 'cvs diff foodir/foo.c' reports "cvs diff: No CVSROOT specified!" etc., clearly indicating it is not finding the foodir/CVS/Root file. This seems to me to be a bug, since the online documentation states (Quote) 'Once you've checked a working copy out from the repository, it will remember where its repository is (the information is recorded in the `CVS/Root' file in the working copy). The -d option and the `CVS/Root' file both override the $CVSROOT environment variable.' (End quote) While there are clearly a number of ways of avoiding this problem (get CVSROOT right is favourite, or use -d), this is not always easy to achieve or suitable as a long-term fix. I stumbled on this while using cvs diff inside a perl system() call; it turned out that the shell initialisation files set CVSROOT to the 'wrong' value. Yes, I can fix that too for the immediate problem, but since I can't just leave CVSROOT unset it's always going to be the wrong value on some occasions. David [EMAIL PROTECTED]
