If you are having trouble with CVS, this appendix may help. If there is a particular error message which you are seeing, then you can look up the message alphabetically. If not, you can look through the section on other problems to see if your problem is mentioned there.
Here is a partial list of error messages that you may see from CVS. It is not a complete list---CVS is capable of printing many, many error messages, often with parts of them supplied by the operating system, but the intention is to list the common and/or potentially confusing error messages.
The messages are alphabetical, but introductory text such as `cvs update: ' is not considered in ordering them.
In some cases the list includes messages printed by old versions of CVS (partly because users may not be sure which version of CVS they are using at any particular moment).
cannot change permissions on temporary directory
Operation not permittedThis message has been happening in a non-reproducible, occasional way when we run the client/server testsuite, both on Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 and 4.1. We haven't been able to figure out what causes it, nor is it known whether it is specific to linux (or even to this particular machine!). If the problem does occur on other unices, `Operation not permitted' would be likely to read `Not owner' or whatever the system in question uses for the unix
EPERM
error. If
you have any information to add, please let us know as
described in section BUGS. If you experience this error
while using CVS, retrying the operation which
produced it should work fine.
cannot open CVS/Entries for reading: No such file or directory
cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot rename file file to CVS/,,file: Invalid argument
cvs [update aborted]: could not patch file: No such file or directory
patch
program. Make sure that it is in your
PATH
. Note that despite appearances the message
is not referring to whether it can find file.
cvs update: could not patch file; will refetch
dying gasps from server unexpected
end of file from server (consult above messages if any)
rsh
program and it exited with
an error. In this case the rsh
program should
have printed a message, which will appear before the
above message. For more information on setting up a
CVS client and server, see section 3.9 Remote repositories.
cvs commit: Executing 'mkmodules'
cvs commit: Rebuilding administrative file databaseIf you see both messages, the database is being rebuilt twice, which is unnecessary but harmless. If you wish to avoid the duplication, and you have no versions of CVS 1.7 or earlier in use, remove
-i mkmodules
every place it appears in your modules
file. For more information on the modules
file,
see section C.1 The modules file.
rcs error: Unknown option: -x,v/
cvs [server aborted]: received broken pipe signal
cvs commit: Up-to-date check failed for `file'
cvs
update
. So before proceeding with your cvs
commit
you need to cvs update
. CVS will merge
the changes that you made and the changes that the
other person made. If it does not detect any conflicts
it will report `M cacErrCodes.h' and you are ready
to cvs commit
. If it detects conflicts it will
print a message saying so, will report `C cacErrCodes.h',
and you need to manually resolve the
conflict. For more details on this process see
section 5.3 Conflicts example.
Usage: diff3 [-exEX3 [-i | -m] [-L label1 -L label3]] file1 file2 file3
Only one of [exEX3] allowedThis indicates a problem with the installation of
diff3
and rcsmerge
. Specifically
rcsmerge
was compiled to look for GNU diff3, but
it is finding unix diff3 instead. The exact text of
the message will vary depending on the system. The
solution is to make sure rcsmerge
finds GNU
diff3. Depending on how rcsmerge
was compiled,
it might be sufficient to place GNU diff3 in your
PATH
, or it might be necessary to recompile
rcsmerge
or find a binary distribution of
rcsmerge
which looks in the PATH
.
cvs commit: warning: editor session failed
#!/bin/sh vi $* exit 0
Here is a list of problems which cannot be readily looked up based on an error message. They are in no particular order.
cvs update
finds a conflict and tries to
merge, as described in section 5.3 Conflicts example, but
doesn't tell you there were conflicts, then you may
have an old version of RCS. For more information
on how to set this up, see the `INSTALL' file in
the CVS source distribution.
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