Over the weekend I moved my entire CVS repository from my home server to a domain hosted on the dedicated web server for my web hosting company. From what I read online, it was as simple as copying all the files to the new location. This appeared to work, but when I tried to create a new project and share it to the repository using Eclipse, I received the following error:
Hmm, unrecognized keyword 'UseNewInfoFmtStrings'. I tried searching Google and although I didn't find very much in the way of a solution, there were hints to the error possibly relating to differences in CVS versions. So I checked my home server version: CVS 1.12.13. Then I checked the version of CVS on my web server: CVS 1.11.17. Ah ha!
My next thought was to upgrade CVS on my web server. But then I discovered my web server (CentOS 4) doesn't have the CVS 1.12 package available because only stable packages are supported. I decided it was best to keep the server stable and starting looking for a way to "downgrade" the 1.12 repository to make it compatible with 1.11.
My eventual solution was to backup /home/dev82/cvsroot/CVSROOT/history, which contains the history information for all the files in the repository, and then delete the /home/dev82/cvsroot/CVSROOT/ directory. After this, I simply ran the following command to recreate CVSROOT and make it compatible with CVS 1.11:
root@web# cvs -d /home/dev82/cvsroot/ init
With the fresh CVSROOT directory in place, I copied the history file back to /home/dev82/cvsroot/CVSROOT/, overwriting the existing one that the cvs init command created.
My biggest worry with doing this was possibly losing history information or somehow being unable to restore files, etc. However, I was able to successfully, create, commit, and restore files from the history. I also had no errors creating new projects and sharing them with the CVS repository.
If anyone knows of a better solution, or has any information on what potential problems following this procedure might have, please leave a comment and let me know!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I discovered any new files I committed to my repository were being saved to the ./Attic directory. The ./Attic directory is used by CVS for files that have been deleted. If someone checks out a version of the code where that file existed, CVS will pull the file out of the Attic and allow it to be checked out. The funny thing was that my newly committed file still checked out normally even though it only existed in the Attic on the server.
Eventually, I concluded the trouble of moving a 1.12 repository to a server running CVS 1.11 wasn't worth the trouble. I checked out the latest versions of all my projects, deleted the CVS meta-data from them (Eclipse allows you to do this automatically when you disconnect a project from a CVS repository), and then created a new clean repository and checked all the projects back in. My history information is gone, but if I ever discover I really need an old version of a file, I still have a copy of the original repository on my home server.