[wellylug] CVS woe

nic nic at tymar.com
Fri Apr 3 09:13:13 NZDT 2009


I can't help for the specific question for the reason that I also had enough of CVS 
several years ago, and moved to SVN. The change wasn't painful, and version-control-life 
has been much better since then. I occasionally look at GIT/BZR/DARCS, but none have 
seemed enough of an advance to compel me to leave SVN

Nic

Daniel Pittman wrote:
> Jethro Carr <jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com> writes:
> 
>> CVS is driving me crazy (again).... I've spent 1.5 hours trying to
>> figure out how to make it do something that should take less than 10
>> seconds!!!
> 
> To paraphrase...
> 
> First, you have a problem that needs revision control.
> "Ah!", you think, "I will use CVS."  Now you have two problems...
> 
>> All I want to do, is to get a list of commit messages since a
>> particular tag, so I can use it for a changelog, or just simply so I
>> have an idea of the changes I've made and why when I create a diff.
>>
>> Now I've tried using:
>> cvs rlog -r MYTAG::
>>
>> But that doesn't seem to work, I just end up with a list of all
>> changes ever committed since the repository start.
> 
> Mmmm.  The '-r' option to rlog only supports branches or revision
> numbers, as you note...
> 
>> I think the -r option for rlog refers to the file revision, not a tag,
>> if I'm reading the man pages correctly, but I can't find any method to
>> specify fetching log by a tag.
> 
> Correct.  Presumably because that is insanely hard, is it would involve
> trolling every file for the revision that tag is associated with, then
> generate the log from that.
> 
>> There are some 3rd party scripts floating around that can do it, but
>> I'm sure there must be some way in CVS itself to make it happen...
> 
> Nope.  Hard luck.  Try using something other than tags (or CVS. ;)
> 
> 
> Actually, in the spirit of charity, the best approach is:
> 
> 1. Use log or rlog on a single file to identify the time and date of the
>    tag.  Something early in the tagging process is a good plan.
> 
> 2. Use the '-D' argument to log or rlog to obtain all changes since that
>    point in time, since this is supported by CVS.
> 
> Don't forget to allow enough slop in there to catch the fact that CVS
> tags the current time it processed the file, not of the operation, into
> the individual files.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> I'm heading off to bed before I toss my screen through the window in
>> frustration - hopefully someone here can help me, to save the life of
>> an innocent computer. :-)
> 
> Um, converting CVS to SVN is really not terribly hard, and will
> significantly improve your life.  Certainly it is a fairly trivial step
> away from CVS, but a significantly less limited and painful one.
> 
> Regards,
>         Daniel
> 
> 



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