Re: Determine Branching Date

[Mark D. Baushke]

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Peter Connolly <address@hidden> writes:
> On 7/29/07, ehchn1 <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > I would like to find out whether it's possible
> > for us to determine the exact date for a
> > branching done in CVS.

CVS does not normally keep this information for you. 
If you use a history configuration to track rtag commands,
then the 'cvs history' command will be able to give you
some information.

You may also write a taginfo trigger to keep track
of when a tag operaton is performed.

The basic problem is that you may do anything to
your tree with regard to mixing explicit date
stamps and branches to checkout something that you
wish to tag. Also, tags may be added to files or
deleted from files long after the rest of the
files have been tagged.

If you know that you did a single branch tag of a
tree that was nominally up-to-date, then using a
tool that analyzes the 'date' of all of the
revisions in your repository would give you a
window of time during which your tag was created.
The time will be no earlier than the most recent
commit to the parent branch of the tag which your
new branch can see and no later than the first
revision committed to the new branch.

Tools such as cvs2cl (see
www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/) have options to help you
find this kind of information.

> > Reason is that I didn't keep track of the
> > branching date, so hopefully CVS would have
> > such information.
>
> I've not been able to figure this out either. As
> a result, I include the date as part of the tag
> or branch name.

Generally, I put down a revision tag on the
sources in a tree that is known to build and be
what I want and then use an rtag to branch from
that revision tag.

The addition of 'LogHistory=TMAR' ensures that
my 'cvs history' command will locate the dates
where a 'cvs rtag' operation was run (the 'T'
records rtag operations).

The typical naming convention I use is given a
'branch-name' the tag I use is 'branch-name_BP'
where the _BP is for the branch point.

        Enjoy!
        -- Mark
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