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Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:04:41 -0400
From: Don Hatch <hatch AT plunk DOT org>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Cc: Don Hatch <hatch AT plunk DOT org>
Subject: Re: checking in >= 256k file fatally corrupts rcs file
Message-ID: <20131009180441.GA24121@plunk.org>
References: <20131008102204 DOT GB9241 AT plunk DOT org> <525499E5 DOT 4090608 AT etr-usa DOT com> <20131009003055 DOT GA30082 AT plunk DOT org> <5254B1C0 DOT 9020004 AT etr-usa DOT com> <20131009070534 DOT GA8855 AT plunk DOT org> <52555C16 DOT 5090505 AT etr-usa DOT com>
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On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 07:37:26AM -0600, Warren Young wrote:
> On 10/9/2013 01:05, Don Hatch wrote:
> >
> >if I forget to set the variable, or set it wrong,
> >or someone else doesn't know about the variable and runs into the bug,
> >then corruption happens and work is irretrievably lost.
> 
> How is this more difficult than what you're already doing, manually
> rolling back to the previous version?

Not necessarily more difficult, but more dangerous/fragile
and therefore requiring continual attention at the user level.
My preference is to not have the broken version on my system at all--
then I can relax and not be continually worrying about whether
each different way I (or anyone else including root daemons)
use rcs is going to somehow circumvent the environment variable
and destroy more work.

> 
> We're talking about a one-time one-line change to your .bash_profile:
> 
>     export RCS_MEM_LIMIT=10240

That assumes too much: that only one user account uses rcs
(consider other users and root startup scripts and daemons),
that all of my usages of rcs are through the command line
(consider helper scripts and tools),
and that the only command line I use is bash (it's not).
Too fragile.

> >(I lost a significant amount when I hit the bug).
> 
> I assume you're talking about the record of changes between your
> last backup and the current version.  The last backup should be
> pretty recent, so your current version shouldn't be too far
> different from it.

I'm not completely following what you're saying,
but I believe I lost more than what you're describing.
I lost the current working file (which I had just put
at least a day of good work into) and the rcs file became
useless for getting any previous versions, either-- I had to
revert to the most recent backup of the rcs file.
I don't remember precisely why I lost the working file--
I might have done a "ci" rather than a "ci -l" at some point,
or it may be because I had an $id$ tag
that caused the working file to be rewritten from the rcs file
which no longer had good data in it.

I remember at the first moment I noticed something was awry,
I still had the contents of the working file in an editor buffer...
not realizing the seriousness of what was going on,
I exited the editor, thereby discarding the only remaining
good copy of the file.  Blech.

Don

-- 
Don Hatch
hatch AT plunk DOT org
http://www.plunk.org/~hatch/

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