Re: Problem with timezone change in the log output

[Thomas Singer]

Hi Mark,

Thank you for the feed-back.

> You may wish to checkout a copy of the mainline CVS sources as there has
> been a patch to the 'cvs log' and 'cvs ls' code since 1.12.9 was released

SmartCVS is a CVS client itself (does not use cvs.exe), so the patch 
does not help :)

> The time is sent via output_tagged with a "date" tag in UTC.

Do you mean the MT response?

> btw: Time is being output in ISO 8601 format "2004-07-29 09:00:00 -0700"
> or "2004-07-29 16:00:00 +0000" instead of "2004/07/29 16:00:00" so you
> may need to deal with paring dates with a timezone if you are not
> already doing it in SmartCVS.

Yes, I will need to do it in SmartCVS. The problem is, that such changes 
at server side always make parsing stop working. Don't CVS server 
developers care much/enough about applications which (need to) parse the 
output of some CVS commands?

> > BTW, I very much would appreciate, if the CVS could produce
> > fully-parsable log output, e.g. by escaping special characters in the
> > commit messages.
>
> I am not exactly sure what you mean. If you have suggestions that you
> can express in terms of a patch to the cvs sources with tests to be
> added to sanity.sh, they might be adopted.

The problem is, that the CVS *server* tries to create human readable 
output, which is relatively hard to parse exactly by a machine (and 
sometimes impossible). IMHO it would be very nice, if the CVS server 
could produce machine parsable output, which then will be translated to 
human readable output by the CVS client (including command line CVS).
With "escaping special characters" I mean, that the commit messages in 
the log-output contain, for example, "\n" for carriage returns (instead 
of splitting it into multiple M responses), so the parser cannot be 
confused by (stupid) commit messages like this:

revision 1.68
date: 2004/07/27 18:49:23;  author: tom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -0; 
kopt: o;
no message
----------------------------
revision 1.67
date: 2004/07/17 13:20:21;  author: tom;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -0; 
kopt: o;
no message
----------------------------


BTW, are there any serious (!) plans to merge with CVSNT, so CVS client 
developers like me don't have to write work-arounds for different CVS 
servers?

--
Best regards,
Thomas Singer
_____________
smartcvs.com



Mark D. Baushke schrieb:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Thomas Singer <thomas.singer@smartcvs.com> writes:
>
>
> > My name is Thomas Singer and I'm the core developer of SmartCVS.
> >
> > A user reported me, that parsing the output of the log command does
> > not work correctly with GNU CVS >= 1.12.9. I know, there are always
> > user requests (at least in the CVSNT mailing list) to show all dates
> > in local timezone. But I don't fully understand, why the CVS *server*
> > should report the date in local timezone (which needs to be told the
> > CVS server before). The conversion from UTC to the local timezone can
> > be handled very easily at client side.
>
>
> You may wish to checkout a copy of the mainline CVS sources as there has
> been a patch to the 'cvs log' and 'cvs ls' code since 1.12.9 was released:
>
> | * Thanks again to Bart Robinson <lomew@pobox.com>, `cvs log' & `cvs
> |   ls' now actually output local times when the server is version 1.12.9
> |   or greater and the client is version 1.12.10 or greater.
>
> The time is sent via output_tagged with a "date" tag in UTC. It is up to
> the client to convert it locally which is done correctly in 1.12.9.1 and
> will be visible in 1.12.10 at such time as that version is released.
>
> btw: Time is being output in ISO 8601 format "2004-07-29 09:00:00 -0700"
> or "2004-07-29 16:00:00 +0000" instead of "2004/07/29 16:00:00" so you
> may need to deal with paring dates with a timezone if you are not
> already doing it in SmartCVS.
>
>
> > BTW, I very much would appreciate, if the CVS could produce
> > fully-parsable log output, e.g. by escaping special characters in the
> > commit messages.
>
>
> I am not exactly sure what you mean. If you have suggestions that you
> can express in terms of a patch to the cvs sources with tests to be
> added to sanity.sh, they might be adopted.
>
>         -- Mark
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (FreeBSD)
>
> iD8DBQFBCSAx3x41pRYZE/gRApdUAKCSANIq/cum5LEpI/30jRFc0OTclACgmY2G
> NZsBn084FVNwXnArfcHoX3k=
> =EO6+
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----