RE: History of the project

[Arthur Barrett]

Larry,

> > > Can somebody tells me what the ... is the meaning of these columns???
> > 
> > http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/cvs-1.11.23/cvs_16.html#SEC144
> 
> Unfortunately, that section does *not* document the format of the
> history output (although it should).


I thought all the columns except the 'type' column were self explanatory, and 
that page explains the record type column pretty well.  So yes I interpreted 
the question to be not 'what is the precise definition and meaning of each and 
every column?', but rather as 'what is the meaning of the unobvious column?' - 
and maybe a little of 'where is the manual for this confounded thing?'.

It could be argued that the section should also explain a lot of other things 
about history, including that it's not failsafe, that the history is not 
created automatically (not only does the CVSROOT/history file need to exist to 
run the history command it must exist before history is recorded), the meaning 
of each column, how to configure which command types are listed by default etc 
etc.  But the page for the 'log' command doesn't explain the output of 'log' 
either, so if the manual is currently unhelpful then at least the manual is 
consistently unhelpful:
http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/cvs-1.11.23/cvs_16.html#SEC150

My suspicion has always been that the original idea for the manual was that 
each thing should only be documented in one place (easier to change later that 
way) - and since the output of history is more-or-less the stored format of 
history I think that's the only place it gets documented.  I did think I saw a 
link to the administration files section of the manual from the history command 
page, but on closer inspection there does not appear to be such a link...

Regards,



Arthur