val-tags

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Dec 19), Peter Bortas @ Pike  developers forum said:
> What function does CVSROOT/val-tags fill? I'm trying to check out the
> c7_4_10 tag but get:
> 
> % cvs up -r v7_4_10                                         ..ter/hack/Pike/7.4
> cvs [server aborted]: cannot write /pike/data/cvsroot/CVSROOT/val-tags: Permission denied

It's a cache of known tags; the idea is that it gets updated when
anyone creates a tag, and CVS will check that file when anyone does a
-r TAGNAME operation.  It doesn't do anything but cause trouble as far
as I know (since it doesn't really speed anything up), and was never
fully implemented in the first place.  The fix for your problem is to
make /pike/data/cvsroot/CVSROOT/val-tags world-writeable in the CVS
repository.  CVS v1.11.1 and newer ignore write errors to val-tags, I
believe.

I usually work around it by finding the date the tag was layed down,
and using cvs -D instead of -r.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com