Re: Exporting file versions

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Jason Yeung wrote:

> I'm trying to use the export command to export files of a given revision,
> but am unsuccessful. The command and options I ran is "cvs export -r 1.2 -d
> testing testing123" and the error I get is "tag `1.2' must be a symbolic
> tag". If I create tags to represent the revisions and run and "cvs export -r
> ver12 -d testing testing123"  (ver12 represents all files in revision 1.2),
> it'll export OK.

The revision number 1.2 does not serve as a baseline identifier. Every
file has its own independent sequence (or tree, really) of revision
numbers created as new versions are committed to that file. So when you
request version 1.2 of every file, you get a meaningless collection of
versions that are not related together in any logical way.

> Because my project has a lot of files, creating tags for each version of a
> file would be very tedious. I was wondering if there's a way to export files
> without creating tags? If you need tags to export, what would be the easiest
> way to create the tags without going through every file and create tags
> individually?

Note that export is equivalent to checkout, followed by the deletion of the
CVS/ subdirectories.  In fact, that is how it is implemented; during
export, the CVS/ directories are created, and then deleted.
 
The checkout command will, to my recollection allow you to specify the
numeric revision -r 1.2. So if you really want to get a
meaningless collection of versions as one baseline, you can do it
by checkout, followed by something like

find <dir> -type d -name CVS | xargs rm -rf.