Question

I am using WinCVS as client and CVSNT as my source control server. Some of the files I wanted to add to my CVS repo, were added as Unicode files. Now, I want to recommit the same as ANSI (aka ASCII) files. However, despite deleting the old files from the repo, every time I add the file with the same name, it automatically assigns Unicode encoding to the file.

Is there a way out? Or in other words, can I change the encoding of a file, once it is added to CVS?

Answer 1

There’s a couple of things that (might) come into play here:

• you can disable automatic file type detection in WinCvs itself: go to Admin|Preferences|Globals, the option named ‘Supply control when adding files’ – in theory you should be able to use the regular Add command from the toolbar after you have done this

• make sure you don’t have any entries in your cvswrappers (both client- and server-side) that define the file types you’re adding as unicode

• recent versions of WinCvs come bundled with a macro for adding files with a specific k-mode for the cases not covered by the WinCvs UI (look for Macros|Add|Extended Add Selection… – you should probably explicitly force it to use ‘Text’ (aka -kt) to make sure the server performs no file type auto-detection either

• CVSNT supports versioning of file type changes. The command sequence for this in your case would be cvs update -kt followed by cvs commit -f

• recent versions of WinCvs also come bundled with a macro for performing the latter, it’s under Macros|CVS|Change File Options

[I am the author of both of the macros quoted here so feel free to contact me if they’re giving you any trouble – you can find my contact information inside the macros themselves]