Subject: rcs == whirling blades of death in B19
From: [email-masked] (David O'Riva)

25 Mar 1998 00:55:41 -0800
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To: [email-masked]

Running B19 w/coolview (March 15 version) on NT 4.0 SP3:
        CYGWIN32=title binmode notty
        all mounts are text=binary

rcs is eating our files!  I installed rcs-5.7, and applied wolfgang's patch
to get it to configure and build.  Everything looked great, until it
suddenly and inexplicably munched a revision storage file.  This is a Bad
Thing.  

Experimentation revealed the following:

   * The problem only happens when a stored revision is longer than 1K.
   * The problem is very sporadic
   * When it happens, the stored "text" of a revision is truncated to exactly
     1024 bytes and it's position in the revision tree is changed!!!

Further investigation seems to indicate that something is going wrong in the
guts of fastcopy(). What's strange is that everything starts to work
correctly when the has_mmap flag is forced ON in conf.h, even though
configure blows up when trying to determine the status of mmaping on the
system.  There was a message earlier on in the list about configure blowing
up when trying to check a situation which is impossible under 95/NT, which
prompted my trying this - is this a reasonable solution?

We are trying to find and solve this problem here, but if any of you have
run into it before (or can categorize it faster than we can!), some advice
would sure be appreciated.

thanks!
-dave                                         ________  _______ ____
---------------------------------------------/_ \     \/|  ___ \    \- -
David O'Riva - Staff Programmer                /|  |\  \|  ____/ /\  \
   [email-masked]                            /|  |/  /|  |\/\  \/  /\
      "2^168 to 1 against and counting..."    __|_____o/|__o\ /\____o\ 
                                      - - ---/________\/____\--/____\-- -

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