user variables

[Jerry Nairn]

Hi,
We have a certain nightly build which checks out only what is tagged
"IT_BUILDS". This way, developers can keep committing their changes to this
project without worrying about breaking the nightly build. When they want
the change to go live, they "can tag -F IT_BUILDS".
I don't want to go into CM practices or a discussion of whether this is a
good thing.
Here is the issue:
Some developers like this a lot. Some don't because:
a) They are too lazy to commit AND tag.
and/or
b) They don't check in anything until they are sure it's ready to go live.

So, I want to provide a method for developers who want to tag every time
they commit to do that automatically, and still have other developers be
able to continue working as they have.
It seemed like a way to do this was with the "cvs -s var=foo" mechanism.
Those who want can put
cvs -s TAG_IT_BABY=YEAH
in their .cvsrc
Then I can put the variable on a line in loginfo. If the variable is set via
"cvs -s" everything works fine.
If the variable is not set, then the user gets an error message and the
command is not executed.
The developer would see:
cvs commit: loginfo:28: no such user variable ${=TAG_IT_BABY}
But there's no way for me to find out from cvs that the developer got this
error. The email about this commit, which would also have been sent by this
command line is never sent. The directories which are automatically updated
by certain commits would not be updated because of this error.
I guess what I'm saying is that "${=TAG_IT_BABY}" should be expanded to a
null string if the variable isn't set. It shouldn't cause cvs to refuse to
even try to execute a command line in an administrative file.
Does anyone have a workaround for this?
I don't consider it a workaround to tell everyone what to do. I was already
planning to do that. I want to know if there is a workaround for the
positively gross thing that happens when anyone doesn't do what I say.
Thanks,
Jerry