RE: Diffing previous revision

[Vince Rice]

> I would say "cvs status" is a much shorter and quicker way to find the
> current revision number of a given file.

Yes, but it is the previous revision number I need, not the current.

> Personally I almost always have a $Id (or equivalent) line
> somewhere in (usually at the top or bottom) my source files,
> and since I'm usually looking at the file in an editor buffer
> when I want to know it's revision number, a simple cursor
> jump command will find it.  Since I almost always use CVS from
> PCL-CVS, thus also from within my editor, I then just jump to
> the *cvs* buffer and run the diff command with the appropriate
> parameter.

Thanks, but this doesn't help (I didn't even know what PCL-CVS was until
this email; now that I do it still doesn't help as I don't use emacs :) ).
I'm not in an editor when I need to do this, I'm at the command line.


> There was a discussion long ago about naming conventions for magic
> tags like "HEAD", and your proposed "PREV".  Unfortunately we've gone
> through more than enough releases in the mean time to have migrated to
> those new conventions, ane yet the migration was never done.  I sure
> as heck wouldn't want yet another magic name that didn't follow the
> proposed convention to be introduced and then have to wait indefinitely
> again to have it renamed too!  :-)

Well, I'm new to CVS, so I don't know the discussions to which you're
referring, nor do I know what you mean by "those new conventions".  The PREV
was just a method of communicating what I was after; I don't care what the
name is, just a way to specify the previous revision without having to know
the actual revision number.

> On the other hand a small wrapper script could combine the
> "status/diff" into one command....  In my case I could easily write
> an editor macro to do the same, though I don't find the current method
> too much of a burden.

Yes, I've thought about writing a perl script to do the log/diff (again, I
need the previous revision, not the current one).  I guess that's what I'll
do; I just thought I'd see if I was the only one that wants to do this on a
regular basis.  And perhaps I am. :)

Thanks again,

Vince