Re: Removing a revision but not its date&log

[Urs Thuermann]

Stuart Cooper <address@hidden> writes:

> revisions are cheap in terms of space (stored as diffs against the
> previous head in the ,v file). broken revisions can be addressed
> through tagging- the good stuff that was part of a stable release
> is tagged, the other stuff isn't. So you can see through the top of
> the output of cvs log which revs of a file are good, which ones
> aren't.

I know about diffs and space requirements.  I've been using RCS since
10 or so years and CVS since a couple of years.  I actually knew about
removing revisions from RCS files with rcs -o although I've never used
it.  I didn't want to discuss here if it's reasonable to ever do this,
for whatever reasons.

But, since the possiblity is there, I just wondered if it is possible
to keep the logs and check-in date when removing revisions.  Or more
exactly, I wanted to know if the RCS file format lets you have these
information without having the revisions file content.  I wanted to
know that because I'd like to construct RCS files and put them into my
CVS repository from old and not quite complete sources I have lying
around here in several directories, from 15-20 years ago, when I
haven't used any versioning tool.

I do know now, it's not possible.

> Inevitably you will lose some history in combining multi versions
> of your source into a new CVS repository.

Well, I don't lose what's still here, but I won't be able to add
retroactively guessed/estimated meta information of revisions I
haven't kept.

> Once your project is fully under CVS control you'll be in much
> better shape from here on in, of course.

ACK.

> Having looked at RCS revision files, you've seen that storing
> versions is cheap on disk space :-).

ACK, quite some time ago :-)

urs