[sane-devel] wish for cvs server

Henning Meier-Geinitz henning@meier-geinitz.de
Sat, 26 Jan 2002 13:07:23 +0100


Hi,

On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 10:37:15AM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > My book about CVS tells me that this is abug in CVS and a workaround
> > is to chnage the owner to the one cvs runs as (changing permissions
> > only is not enough) or to remove the file. I don't know if this is
> > an option.
> 
> Do you know why it is created in the first place?  It would be nice to
> get rid of the problem once and for all. :-)

I can only cite from "Open Source Development with CVS" from Karl
Fogel,  because I don't maintain a CVS server myself :-):

"Tips And Troubleshooting

[...]
Tag Operations Fail, Something About "val-tags." What's Going On?
If you see an error like this:

cvs [export aborted]: cannot write /usr/local/myproj/CVSROOT/val-tags: Operation not permitted

it means the user CVS is running as does not have permission to write
to the CVSROOT/val-tags file. This file stores valid tag names, to
give CVS a fast way to determine what tags are valid. Unfortunately,
CVS sometimes modifies this file even for operations that are
read-only with respect to the repository, such as checking out a
project.

This is a bug in CVS and may be fixed by the time you read this. Until
then, the solution is either to make val-tags world-writable or,
failing that, to remove it or change its ownership to the user running
the CVS operation. (You's think just changing the permissions would be
enough, but on several occasions I've had to change the ownership,
too.)"

And from the same book:

"Complete CVS reference
[...]

val-tags
Caches valid tag names for speedier lookups. You should never need to
edit this file, but you may need to change its permissions, or even
ownership, if people are having trouble retrieving or creating tags."

By the way: Some chapters of the book can be found at:
http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/sepp/cvs-1.10-to/cvsbook/main_1.html

As usual, I found out about this after I wrote the above :-)

Bye,
  Henning