RE: revision/version numbers

[Jim.Hyslop]

Katherine King [mailto:address@hidden wrote:
> It doesn't as such - the tester has to trust us that far, but 
> this is still
> something that they are demanding.
I'm still not clear *why* these testers - who you said earlier are not
programmers - have to verify whether a file has actually changed or not.
What good will it do them? If the file has changed, are they qualified to
understand the nature of the changes and verify that the nature of the
change is correct? If not, then why are they interested? A programmer could
change something completely unrelated, and all these testers would be able
to do is say "yes, it's changed." So what?

In an earlier message, you said:
> They want logs of 
> everything - build,
> local unit testing, deployment to dev environment, unit testing on dev
> environment, deploy to test environment, unit testing on test 
> environment,
> application logs etc, etc....
Sounds like they want to make sure you have done your job. Isn't that your
manager's responsibility?

Your QA group should not be interested in all this stuff, they should be
interested in the behaviour of the program. If their test suites (hopefully
automated) cannot verify that the program behaviour has changed, then it's
time to tell them "When you can do your job properly, then you can hover
over my shoulder and tell me how to do my job. Until then..."

Now, having said all that, if they want to see if something's changed, they
can use the diff command:

cvs diff -rPREVIOUS_TAG -rCURRENT_TAG filename

If diff says nothing, then the file has not changed.

To get exactly what you have asked for (which is really not that useful,
given what the goal of your testers seems to be) you can issue these
commands:
  echo ^RCS file:>filerev
  echo ^revision >>filerev
  cvs log -rCURRENT_TAG | grep -f filerev

The output will look something like this:
cvs server: Logging .
RCS file: /cvs/cvs-test/jhyslop/file1,v
revision 1.1
RCS file: /cvs/cvs-test/jhyslop/file2,v
revision 1.1
RCS file: /cvs/cvs-test/jhyslop/new.txt,v
revision 1.1.1.1
RCS file: /cvs/cvs-test/jhyslop/test.bmp,v
revision 1.1

But don't give them that until and unless they prove they *really* need to
do it :-)

-- 
Jim