Re: revision/version numbers

[Paul Sander]

Labels are not immutable; they can be moved around.  Some shops deliberately
use floating labels, e.g. to identify the latest sources eligible for build.
This cuts down on clutter under several methodologies.  Under such conditions,
pulling from a specific (floating) label may NOT pull the expected code.
(Note also that if every build is labelled explicitly, it doesn't take long
before there are literally thousands of labels applied to files, if the
project lives for any length of time.  People who have lived under these
conditions sometimes go to great lengths to minimize the number of labels
they create, or clean up frequently.  So there may not even be a label to
pull from if the anticipatory or clean-up algorithms are not 100% correct
(and they never are).

Also, it may be that the Q/A department uses a whitebox approach and focuses
its efforts on the code contained by files that have changed since the last
testing cycle.  In that case, they really do need a list of files that change
from one build to the next.

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Not so!  If I need to audit the old code I pull from the label!
Are you going to pull from individual file version numbers, instead?
And if you are being required to compare versions to labels
why aren't you trusting your versioning system?

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 04:19:57PM -0500, Bert Robbins wrote:
> The label collectively identifies the files and their individual revisions.
> The label alone is useless in an audit.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Donald Sharp [mailto:address@hidden
> > 
> > Why do you need this?  What is important is the label!
> > 
> > If you can't convince them that it's not terribly important
> > pull a workspace over the release label and do a cvs status -R
> > and parse the output.
> > 
> > On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 03:56:47PM -0500, Katherine King wrote:
> > > 
> > > I am pretty much a beginner to CVS, but somehow "becoming" 
> > the expert on the
> > > team, and this is now causing me to need to ask for some 
> > help.  We have a
> > > CVS repository, and we are working with branches and tags, 
> > no problem.  But
> > > we need a little more information about revision numbers 
> > for the quality
> > > assurance team.  I have been able to get this for the main 
> > branch by locking
> > > the tree - this shows the version/revision numbers (cvs 
> > admin -l), but I
> > > need the version/revision numbers for all the files with a 
> > certain tag.  Is
> > > there a way to do this?

--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden