Re: To get some information regarding CVS

[Mark D. Baushke]

Arthur Barrett <address@hidden> writes:

> > True, it is open-source, so anybody could in principle
> > analyze the source code to figure out the format.
> 
> Yes indeed - and if anyone wants a concise list all they need to do is
> ask.  A grep for "findnode.*other_delta" in the source will find all the
> nodes we add, at a quick look myself they are:
> - filename
> - commitid

For what it is worth, if rcs-5.8 is ever released, the same patch I
provided to debian [Bug #352527] (which was released as a part of rcs
5.7-18 in the debian etch release) provides a way for RCS to read and
understand the commitd extension used by CVS and CVSNT.

I had no problems working with Romain Francoise of debian or Paul Eggert
of the GNU project to adopt a final revision of the patch.
(They did choose not to accept my patch to WRITE new commitid entires
using RCS, but that is not really needed if you want something to be
able to parse existing ,v files for CVS and CVSNT.)

> - mergepoint1
> - bugid
> - permissions
> 
> And I'm in the process of adding 'username' (for where the username is
> different to the author - don't ask why - it's a corner case that needs
> to be covered).

You might want to discuss the best way to do the encoding for such
things with the address@hidden and/or address@hidden folks
before you lock it into your code base.

> As the Product Managger CVSTN at March Hare Software I think I can
> answer on behalf of 'the commercial supporters'.
> 
> We are spending out effort on the areas that people who use the product
> are most often requesting that the effort be spent.  
> 
> You are the first person ever to have requsted the list of RCS tags,

Hmmm... I suspect that technically RCS calls them phrases in their
grammar. The RCS tags are also sometimes known/understood to be symbolic
names for revision numbers.

I personally think it is good to standardize on the RCS format
extensions within the RCS source base.

This is why I made the effort to ensure that the CVS extension of the
commitid RCS phrase was compatible with CVSNT (even though it was not
very necessariy well defined by the CVSNT folks effectively it is a
base62 string [0-9a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z]*) and then I ported it to be
understandable as an RCS phrase extension by RCS so that the RCS
application would not silently strip the ,v file of that extension if it
was ever used on a CVS ,v file.

If there are good grammar definitions for mergepoint1, bugid,
permissions and username, then it would be great if they could be
shared.

Any extensions to values in the other phrases (like kopt) might also be
desirable.

        -- Mark

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