Wrappers (-t/-f)

If you are looking to use -t/-f wrappers, you want the versions of CVS which contain this feature. Note that this is only somewhat related to -k wrappers which are the wrappers that relate to binary files. The -k wrappers are found in all recent versions of CVS.

CVS's with -t/-f are available from CodeFab and Apple.

Regarding specific issues, there have been a number of submitted patches (circa CVS 1.9). Many of them need miscellaneous cleanups. Almost all of them could use a sanity.sh testcase. There is a serious bug in -t/-f wrappers in CVS 1.9.26. Here is Wilfredo Sanchez's version of the client/server patch.

Here is a partial list of specific technical concerns.

• Testsuite.
• Wrappers combine two features -- filtering a file through a script and treating a directory as a single file. It is not clear that these belong as part of the same feature. And whether there is some fairly different way to solve the latter problem. For example, see this patch concerning problems calling dos2unix from wrappers. Another manifestation is that CVS, with -t/-f, assumes that the timestamp of a directory which is being wrapped means something about whether the contents of that directory are modified, and of course that is not a good assumption.
• In general, wrappers calls are scattered throughout CVS without any particularly clear abstraction at work. It just isn't clean. I suspect this may be related to the previous item.
• Client/server done in a clean way (no calls to an external "tar" program hardcoded into CVS, for example).
• In terms of coding standards, checking for errors, freedom from bugs, etc, most of the wrappers code could use some work. Today, src/wrapper.c is better than when it was first added to CVS, but I'd still point to HACKING and the FIXME comments and look for improvements.
• The wrap_tocvs_process_file function needs to not use sprintf (see the FIXME there). This can cause core dumps if one specifies %s twice, but more seriously it is probably a security hole. Likewise wrap_fromcvs_process_file.