RE: Finding out which tags exist

[Jim.Hyslop]

Rolf Leggewie wrote:
> as I am on a slow dial-up connection charged by the minute, I have
> become interested in using anonymous CVS to get diffs to the 
> source code
> for a number of projects. 
[...]
> "status -v ChangeLog" will
> not work unless I have a local working directory of CVS project files
> which I do not.
You can check out just the ChangeLog file, then use the status -v command on
it. Also, the global -z option supports values up to 9. I don't know how
much more compression you get, but if your connection is that slow, it's
probably worth a try.

cvs -z9 co [modulename/path]/ChangeLog
cd [whatever]
cvs -z9 st -v ChangeLog

> Oh, while I am with the experts ;-), just another question.  Is it
> possible to make a fully working CVS working directory and 
> thus save the
> download for a complete initial checkout by importing a source tarball
> in a certain fashion?  I guess this is not the case but wanted to ask
> nonetheless.
Let me see if I understand you correctly - you want to create the directory
tree first, then import the files? This may actually take longer, because
then CVS has to check the current state of the local directory against the
current state of the repository. A fresh checkout is simple - there's no
current state to check.

-- 
Jim Hyslop
Senior Software Designer
Leitch Technology International Inc. (http://www.leitch.com)
Columnist, C/C++ Users Journal (http://www.cuj.com/experts)