[cvsnt] Re: "cvs diff -rHEAD" annoyance

[Tony Hoyle]

On 15 Jul 2004 12:30:13 +0200, Johan Holmberg <holmberg at iar.se> wrote:

>
>Hi !
>
>I think CVSNT behaves strange with respect to files removed from Cvs
>when I issue the command:
>
>    $ cvs diff -rHEAD
>    cvs server: Diffing .
>**  cvs server: foo.txt no longer exists, no comparison available
>
>
>I wonder why the line marked ** appears?

A quick google shows this to be documented behaviour for standard CVS
going back a long way... it seems to be correct to me.

> It seems to me, like the CVSNT server can't make up its mind whether
> the file should be considered to exist or not.

On the contrary, it's telling you precisely what it knows to be true,
that foo.txt has been deleted.

Apparently HEAD has a different meaning for diff.. it's not something
I've looked at though so I'm not sure why.

For some discussion about this see
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3936C0BC.7A48A43D%40teloseng.com

It's not something I'm likely to change without a good reason, as
there are going to be frontend that rely on the anomalous behaviour.

Tony