[seek-dev] cvs woes figured out

[Matt Jones]

Deana and Ricardo,

So...I finally figured out what was wrong with CVS commits.  Turns out 
it was not your accounts at all, but rather one of the directories you 
commonly work in has a space in its name.

Bottom line: don't use directory or file names with spaces in them!

More detailed explanation: The CVS system sends emails whenever someone 
commits changes to a file.  This is accomplished by a series of scripts 
which I obtained from the Apache software foundation.  Those scripts 
have a limitation (aka bug) that prevents then from working properly 
with directories (and maybe files) that have spaces in their names. 
When a name with a space is encountered, the list of files gets 
truncated, and the email processing stops.  The files have already been 
committed to cvs (so no information is lost), but the email is not sent, 
and a lockfile and other temporary files are not cleaned up properly. 
These temporary files then prevent any future users from committing 
anything to the CVS system until they have been cleaned up. I looked 
into modifying the scripts to fix them and allow filenames with spaces, 
but this is more complex than was possible within a short time period. 
So, I will continue to work on making the scripts more robust, but in 
the interim the best workaround is to not use spaces in the names of 
files and directories.

I have changed the seek cvs repository to rename the "niche modeling" 
directory to "niche-modeling". Be sure to update your working copies 
before making further changes to those files.  I have successfully 
tested several commits and it works as far as I can tell.

Please let me know if you see any further problems.

Matt

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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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