How do I delete cvs files?

most everyone who could fix this for you is probably in Washington D.C. for Drupalcon. Be patient

We don't delete releases. Please be more careful when creating them.

CVS is designed to retain history. You cannot completely remove files from CVS. You can however delete them from a branch for future releases. Please review the documentation: http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/quickstart

This is not the right answer. You dont just tell them "be careful". That link you show does NOT tell you how to remove a file from a project. You might as well have sent him to ihavenoidea.com instead. It would have given more info than you provided. If there is a way to remove files, then just give the CVS command lines to do so if you are so smart.

You can however delete them from a branch for future releases.

Oh yea? And just where on that page does it tell you how to do that? No where.

Clown.

Here you go man, since the idiot above is a "RTFM" type of person, and obviously doesnt do that himself, I'll help you out.

First, go to your development directory and then remove all the files you want to remove from CVS. Then on the command line type the following for EACH file you want removed:

cvs remove FILENAME
cvs commit

There you have it. Removing files from CVS. None of that RTFM crap.

Please, what's the attitude here?

wwwebernet is right.

Any person with a good pair of brains would naturally take his refuge to the good ol' Holy Bible, to find the answer to life, the universe and everything.

@cdlance: Those commands don't actually delete the files from CVS. They remove them from that branch. You need a CVS admin to totally remove something from CVS and that is only done in rare occasions such as license violations. If removing them from the branch is enough for the original poster, fine, but that isn't what s/he asked.

I suggest you apologize to webernet as your comment was out of order.

Michelle

@cdlance, please refrain from needless personal rants. That was totally unnecessary and puts you in a horrible light. webernet was just trying to help. While we appreciate you helping in the queue, taking an aggressive attitude towards others who are trying to help will only kill the karma you gain from helping and cause ill-will.

Regarding telling people to be more careful, the policy is to not delete releases, so if you don't want a release to stick around, then yes, the only answer is to be more thoughtful before creating them. Not sure what other answer you want on that one.

As far as your answer for doing cvs rm on files, that's cool, but it would be even more useful if you updated the docs so that the information would be widely available in a place that folks can find it more easily, rather than having to squirrel down to this closed issue for an answer.

Since you have "answered" the question, I'm reclosing this.

Short note: I realised the handbooks didn't tell people about removing files, so I added information about this.

Thanks to Xano's info I know how the procedure works. But I seem to have an unusual case so I am re-opening this issue and marking it "needs work". Here's the sitch...

In the initial commit of the "GoAway" module, I stupidly included the tar.gz file I had been using while debugging changes with KiamLaLuno. Even though "packaged files are not allowed anywhere" according to CVS, somehow the file got committed to the first release. I noticed the mistake right away, but I decided to follow the manual's advice to not make a new release every ten minutes.

Three months goes by. A couple days ago a user opened an issue on my issue queue; they are asking for the unneeded file to be removed from the module package. Ok, I decided to do it now. So I login to CVS, I tagged the module for a new release and followed Xano's instructions for deletion - which work quite well under most circumstances - but because the offending file is a tar.gz, CVS keeps giving me the following message when I get to the commit...

** Access denied: this file is not allowed:
** contributions/modules/goaway/goaway.tar.gz
** The only file types allowed in contributions/profiles are .profile,
** .inc, .install, .make, and .txt.
** Packaged files (.gz, .tar, .tgz, and .zip) are not allowed anywhere.
** License files (LICENSE.txt) are not allowed, since everything committed
** to the Drupal CVS repository must be licensed under the GPL.
** You should never commit .svn/* or .bzr/* files to the CVS repository.
cvs commit: Pre-commit check failed
cvs [commit aborted]: correct above errors first!

The file is scheduled for removal but I cannot get the commit to stick because of the filetype.

Under these circumstances, what should I do?

Can we change the CVS scripts to ignore when we are deleting files? Seem like this might happen more than once and we wouldn't need CVS admins to do this manually.

I think it should be possible; the file Entries reports if a file is being deleted, and the script that doesn't allow the commit, should skip the checking in such case.

In the rare cases that this happens people should continue to file individual(!) requests in the infra queue.