Known Bugs in CVS

This page describes some of the known bugs in CVS. If you find a bug not on this list, see our page on reporting CVS bugs.

This page is aimed at people who are running released versions of CVS; we have a more detailed, more technical page aimed at people who are running experimental versions of CVS.

Known bugs in CVS 1.10

The "cvs admin -o" command in CVS 1.10 has several bugs which can corrupt the repository. One workaround is to use RCS if you need to delete revisions.

Known bugs in CVS 1.9

Although CVS 1.9 (and older) can handle binary files, there are many known bugs. Most of these bugs result in the file being treated as a text file instead in particular circumstances. The symptom of this typically (on Windows) is that the file gets truncated at the first control-Z character. Most of the known bugs are fixed if both client and server run CVS 1.10 but even with CVS 1.10 we recommend care and getting to know CVS's quirks with binary files.

The CVS 1.9 (and older) client running on Windows is not very good at reporting networking bugs. If you get an error which seems to relate to setting up or maintaining the connection to the server (for example, "cannot start server via rcmd"), there is a good chance that the error message is unhelpful and/or misleading. This happens in cases where the operating system has reported a networking error toCVS; it is the text of the error message which is the issue here not whether an error message occurs at all.

On Windows, using a UNC pathname (for example setting CVSROOT to ":local:\\machine\cvs") will not work with CVS 1.9 (or older). One must instead map it to a drive letter (and then, for example, set CVSROOT to ":local:g:\cvs").

If you running the CVS 1.9 (or older) pserver server, you'll want to look at Security Hole Affects Many CVS pServer Installations. If you don't know what pserver is, this probably doesn't affect you.

With a CVS 1.9 server specifying & in the modules file checks the files out into the wrong directory. This is a bug; the non-client/server CVS 1.9 behaves correctly.

Known bugs in CVS 1.8

CVS 1.8 is also known as CVS 1.8.1. There is one major bug to report: most attempts to use the watch features will result in the following message:

fileattr.c:54: fileattr_delproc: Assertion `node->data != ((void *)0)' failed.

We recommend either not using the watch features or upgrading to CVS 1.9 or later.

Known bugs in CVS 1.3

Oh, gosh. Quite a few... Off the top of my head, adding and deleting files doesn't work nearly as well as with later versions and the documentation isn't as good . I'm sure there are others.