Re: obtain revision information

[Harry Putnam]

address@hidden (Larry Jones) writes:

> Harry Putnam writes:
>> 
>> How can I get the current revision number of a package (module)?
>
> CVS is a *file* versioning system, it does not have any concept of a
> revision number for any larger package.  Most people use tags to
> identify higher-level version information, so perhaps doing a status -v
> on a file to list those tags will provide some information.  If you did
> that on the CVS source repository, for example, you'd see tags like
> cvs1-10-7, cvs1-10-8, and cvs1-11, which correspond to the 1.10.7,
> 1.10.8, and 1.11 releases of CVS.

Thanks Larry, that makes it quite a lot easier to find out version
stuff.  Still a little confused about what some of the output means
though.

Following your suggestion, I thought to run `cvs status -v' on the
ChangeLog of the busiest directory in the package, might be a way to
get the needed info most efficiently.  And it does give some info,
but this output puzzles me a bit:

File: ChangeLog         Status: Needs Patch

   Working revision:    6.1143
   Repository revision: 6.1152  /usr/local/cvsroot/gnus/lisp/ChangeLog,v
   Sticky Tag:          (none)
   Sticky Date:         (none)
   Sticky Options:      (none)

   Existing Tags:
        o0-05                           (revision: 6.1104)
        o0-04                           (revision: 6.969)
        o0-03                           (revision: 6.421)
        o0-02                           (revision: 6.410)
        v                               (revision: 6.408)
        o0-01                           (revision: 6.406)
[...]
        v5-8-8                          (revision: 5.742.2.2)
        v5-8-7                          (revision: 5.522)
        v5-8-6                          (revision: 5.427)
[...]

Should there be a 5 digit gap between Working and Repository?
Then where existing tags are displayed, the most recent revision is 
some 40 less than Reporsitory revision.

A couple of other things I notice:
1) It seems the difference between Working and Repository should be 1.
   Not really sure what those terms means either.. both are committed
   right?

2) There seem to be somewhat random jumps between versions where tags
   were done.  I guess that doesn't follow any particular sequence.
   Maybe just whenever the committers or maintainers feel it will be
   needed?