Re: s the cvs status always shows tags in ordered?

[Michael Haggerty]

Larry Jones wrote:
> Michael Haggerty writes:
>> Larry, do you know of specific situations where the symbol ordering is
>> not preserved, or are you just reluctant to guarantee that it won't
>> happen in the future?
> 
> Lots of people have repository files that were originally created with
> RCS rather than CVS, and some people even continue to use RCS on CVS
> repository files.  I have no idea whether RCS uses the same order as CVS
> or not, I'm not even sure that CVS has always used the current ordering,
> and I'm certainly not willing to guarantee that it won't change in the
> future since there are good reasons to use a more sophisticated data
> structure than a sequentially searched linear list.  The RCS file format
> doesn't guarantee any order so you shouldn't rely on one.

Thanks for the caveats.  Like I said, we don't *rely* on the order per
se; we just use it as part of a heuristic for choosing one branching
topology from the many possibilities that are consistent with the data
recorded in the CVS repository.  If the symbol order is screwed up, we
would still produce a correct conversion, albeit one that is more
complicated than "optimal".

So the fact that you don't seem to know of specific order-scrambling
tools is good enough for me :-)

Michael