How do you work out "automatically" the set of branches and the latest version of each branch within a CVS project ?

[James Ball]

Hello,

I'm new to a company using CVS, though I've experience of using SCCS and
RCS in the past.  I'm currently reading through the CVS book (K Fogel
2000) and I need a bit of help.

I need to work out the set of branches within a given project, and the
latest "version" expressed by the latest TAG for each branch within a
project.  From what I've read there doesn't seem to be any obvious way
to do this, which is puzzling given knowing what code you've got  is
normally a given, or at least essential.

I'm not adverse to shell scripting.  Any script snippets would be warmly
received.  We are running CVS on a Sun Sparc 4 paltform with the Korn
and Bash shells.

Basically, I need to find out what branches we've got and what the
latest "version" of each branch happens to be, and I'm not sure where to
start.  I'm thinking of writing a shell script that interrogates either
the base repository files direct or uses an elegant combination of cvs
commands and their output.  Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Please help as currently I'm a bit stumped for ideas.

Yours

Jim Ball