Re: Add "-b" argument to "cvs rdiff"?

[Larry Jones]

Jonathan Kamens writes:
> 
> I'd like to be able to do date-based comparisons with "cvs rdiff" on a
> branch instead of on the trunk.  As far as I can tell there's no way
> to do that.  The obvious solution seems to be to add a "-b" option to
> rdiff, which would be ignored for "-r" arguments but used for "-D"
> arguments.  My questions:
> 
> 1) Am I correct that what I'm trying to do isn't supported right now?
> 
> 2) Is the solution I'm proposing reasonable?
> 
> 3) Does anybody know of any gotchas I should watch out for when I try
>    to do this and/or suggestions for how to implement the change?

You're thinking too narrowly -- this is a capability that is need for
essentially all CVS commands, not just rdiff.

There was some discussion of this a while back.  Many CVS commands allow
you to specify both -r and -D to get a branch as of a particular date,
but not all of them.  And commands like rdiff and diff aren't amenable
to that solution since they already interpret -r and -D as specifying
two different revisions.  The checkout and update commands allow you to
specify a date on a branch for a join (-j) by using tag:date -- it seems
to me that a better solution is to change all of the CVS commands to
accept that format for -r so that there is consistency between the
commands and deprecate using -r and -D together.

-Larry Jones

Your bangs do a good job of covering up the lobotomy stitches. -- Calvin