[cvsspam-devel] Heads up: oddity under Fedora 8

[Ralph Siemsen]

After a recent upgrade of our CVS server from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8, our 
cvsspam installation started behaving a little oddly.  We changed from 
cvs-1.11.22-6.fc6 to cvs-1.11.22-12.fc8 and users started experiencing 
intermittent problems during checkin, as detailed below.

I reverted back to cvs-1.11.22-6.fc6 while keeping everything else at 
Fedora 8 version, and this appears to "solve" the problem.  It looks 
like Fedora added some patches which interfere with cvsspam operation. 
Specifically, the patch for fedora bugs #277501 and #242049 looks like 
it might be relevant.  Notice the major version of CVS is the same in 
both cases (1.11.12).

I don't think this is a problem in cvsspam, but others might run into 
the same problem, so I thought I would report it here.  I also plan to 
submit a bug to Fedora, once I am sure their patch(es) are responsible.

Unfortunately I am not particularly well-versed in ruby, so it is hard 
for me to tell if cvsspam perhaps is making some assumption that is 
invalidated by Fedora's patches.  I am hoping someone else can either 
confirm the problem or help diagnose it.

Users are seeing intermittent error messages during checkins.  This is 
with the Fedora 8 version of cvs on the server.  There does not seem to 
be any obvious pattern as to which files are affected.  We see it on the 
mainline and on branches.  Here is a snippet:

Checking in common/reg_pers.h;
/cvs-repository/common/reg_pers.h,v  <--  reg_pers.h
new revision: 1.89; previous revision: 1.88
done
cvs diff: cannot find custedit.h
cvs diff: cannot find protocol.h
cvs diff: cannot find reg_pers.c
cvs diff: cannot find reg_pers.h
Checking in frame/info.c;
/cvs-repository/info.c,v  <-- info.c
new revision: 1.238; previous revision: 1.237
done

The checkin succeeds and email is sent as usual, including those files 
that "cvs diff" complained about.  However, the summary portion of the 
email is different.  Normally there are colour-coded counts of lines 
added/removed for each file, but for the "missing" files, we see the 
word "[empty]" on a grey background.

I suspect that the output of the file differences would also be 
affected, but I have that disabled in my configuration, so I don't know 
for sure.  A quick check on our CVS server during checkin seems to 
confirm that the files in question are indeed missing from the temporary 
tree on the server side.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

Regards,
-Ralph