CVS messages and what they mean

Purpose: to list commonly appearing CVS messages (in particular those that MacCVS Pro produces) and explain what they mean (in particular: whether they are signs of trouble and how to fix the problem in question).

<file name> is no longer in the repository
Means what it says, but also that your local copy of this file has now been deleted.
Could not complete an operation on <file name> because the file does not have any revision information
Mac CVS Pro locally keeps information about files in invisible folders that are present in every folder in the tree it has check out files into. In this case, the file is present, and it is in the repository, but there is no local information about the version of the file. This happens if you have manually copied the file into the directory; perhaps you installed a package before it got added to the AlphaTcl CVS or something like that.
CVS chooses to do nothing to these files, which means they will not get updated. If you haven't locally modified this file and don't necessarily want it be frozen at its current version, then you should probably use the "Rollback" command, which will replace the file by the to Mac CVS known version of it that is found in the repository.
sticky tag `HEAD' for file `xxxx.tcl' is not a branch
If you get this message, you're probably an AlphaTcl developer with r/w access to CVS, and is trying to commit a file.
The catch is that HEAD isn't exactly the same thing as "Tip of Trunk", even though they both refer to the same files as far as checking out is concerned. What you need to do is to get rid of this tag. Use the "Update To..." command and select "Reset stickies" as Mode. This removes the HEAD tag and allows your Commit to succeed.

The Alpha Dev > AlphaTcl CVS menu now contains a command named Get MacCVS Pro Messages which incorporates the AppleEvent procedure described below.

Archives

Two annoying things with the Message & Errors window:

this is controlled by a session preference. Go to Session Settings and select the panel Messages and Other. There is check box named Automatically clear message window. Uncheck it to prevent from clearing.

There is however a possibility to save the window with an AppleEvent. Here is a proc which wraps around this AE and saves the messages window into a folder called CvsMessages in Alpha's main folder.

 proc saveCvsMessages {} {
     global HOME
     set res [tclAE::build::resultData 'Mcvs' core getd \
       ---- [tclAE::build::propertyObject Msgs \
            [tclAE::build::indexObject docu -1]]]
     set date [mtime [now]]
     regsub -all " " $date "_" date
     regsub -all "\[/:\]" $date "-" date
     if {![file exists [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages"]]} {
         file mkdir [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages"]
     }
     set fid [open [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages:CvsMsg_$date"] w+]
     puts $fid $res
     close $fid
     status::msg "CVS messages saved in 'CvsMsg_$date'"
 }

Bernard

(03/03/12) Here is a better version which names the output file after the name of the project to make it easier to distinguish which project it comes from. If your MacCVS project is Foo.maccvs, the messages will be stored in Foo_date_time (eg Foo_12-03-03_11-21 today at 11:21 am). More informative than CvsMsg_12-03-03_11-21. Note that the Message window, in MacCVS Pro, must be the topmost window.

    proc saveCvsMessages {} {
	global HOME
	set name [tclAE::build::resultData 'Mcvs' core getd \
	  ---- [tclAE::build::propertyObject pnam \
	       [tclAE::build::indexObject cwin 1]]]
	regexp {[^\.]+} $name name
	set txt [tclAE::build::resultData 'Mcvs' core getd \
	  ---- [tclAE::build::propertyObject Msgs \
	       [tclAE::build::indexObject docu -1]]]
	set date [mtime [now]]
	regsub -all " " $date "_" date
	regsub -all "\[/:\]" $date "-" date
	if {![file exists [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages"]]} {
	    file mkdir [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages"]
	}
	set outname [string range "${name}_$date" 0 30]
	set fid [open [file join $HOME ":CvsMessages:$outname"] w+]
	puts $fid $txt
	close $fid
	status::msg "CVS messages saved in '$outname'"
    }

Category CVS