cvs over ssh with tcsh

[Jay Abel]

This is just a ping to see if anyone has noticed problems running cvs in 
command line server mode over ssh with tcsh installed as the login shell (in 
/etc/passwd).  After a lot of testing (thanks Rene Berber) is seems that the 
problem only occurs when tcsh is my login shell.  If I change my login shell 
to /bin/bash, the problem goes away.

versions are as follows:

Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.11.17 (client/server)
tcsh 6.14.00 (Astron) 2005-03-25 (i386-intel-posix) options 
8b,nls,dl,al,kan,rh,color,dspm
OpenSSH_4.3p2, OpenSSL 0.9.8a 11 Oct 2005
Cygwin DLL version info: DLL version: 1.5.20

Additional info attached.


I googled 'ssh tcsh' and found that some programs (sftp) don't like noisy rc 
scripts, but

tcsh -C /bin/true

produces no output.


The symptoms of failure that I obsererve fall into two categories:

1. cvs client reports 'unrecognized command' along with a piece of one of 
the files uploaded displayed as the offending command, or

2. cvs trace stops dead, with both client and server processes in an O state 
by ps.

It doesn't seem to matter whether the client is started in bash or tcsh; as 
long as the login shell is set to bash, things work perfectly.  When the 
login shell is set to tcsh, cvs fails with one of the above errors.  The 
errors are consistent (same exact bit of text, or fails at same point) for 
the same set of files.  Changing the compression level or which files are to 
be uploaded changes the error.  AFAIK, if the files aren't modified, the 
failure always occurs in exactly the same manner.

For cvs to work at all in server mode, a recent cygwin1.dll is required to 
avoid a problem with cvs attempting to create directories of the form 
/tmp/cvs-servxxx/. (with a trailing dot).

I am using binmode mounts, but the problem also occurs when using textmode 
mounts.

I have also (rarely) found that the cvs server process was suspended S state 
by ps, but haven't been able to reproduce this reliably.

The problem may have been recently introduced; I was using the same machine 
as a cvs server as recently as 4 months ago.  It is possible (likely) that I 
made configuration changes responsible for the failure.  In any case, I've 
updated versions between then and now, and I am sorry to say that I cannot 
say with certainty which versions I was using before, or at least I don't 
know where that information might be hidden, if it does exist.  At this 
point I'm mostly interested in whether anyone else has ever seen this 
behavior.  If not, I'll continue to try to acertain what it is about my tcsh 
configuration which is causing the problem.

Jay Abel
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