= cvsps README = == WARNING == This program has been declared end-of-life. Do not use it unless you have no alternative, and consider its results highly suspect on any CVS repository with branches - that is, anything other than a straight linear succession of commits. For a better alternative, see cvs-fast-export(1). == Overview == CVSps is a program for collecting patchsets from a CVS repository. The original use case was that its reports were useful for human inspection by developers working on projects using CVS, but nowadays the --fast-export option (which emits the history as a git-style fast-import stream) is more interesting. This tool was written and maintained until 2.2b1 by David Manfield, who reported his "thanks to my employer Cobite and Robert Lippman, who've given me time to develop this tool". The 3.x versions with fast-export dumping are maintained by Eric S. Raymond. == Change notices and deprecations == If you have not used an older version of CVSps, you can skip this section. The 3.x versions have changed significantly. In 2012, CVS use is declining swiftly (GNU CVS hasn't been updated since 2004) and the original use case for this tool - browsing change sets in a live CVS repository - is obsolete. The 3.x versions are more focused on the --fast-export mode. Accordingly, a large amount of old code and options have been discarded in order to reduce CVSps's complexity and improve its performance. It now always runs in what used to be cvs-direct mode, doing client transactions with the CVS server and not relying on local CVS commands at all. Consequently, all the hairiness around caching and different log/rlog versions is gone and the tool is much faster. Also, it is no longer required that CVSps be run in a CVS checkout directory; it can run from a repository directory, or actually from anywhere at all providing CVSROOT is set or --root is used. The old -A option enabling ancestry-branch tracking didn't work and has been dropped (equivalent topological analysis is done in fast-export mode). The new -A option accepts an author-mapping file in the same format traditionally accepted by git-cvsimport, cvs2git, git-svn, reposurgeon, and other similar tools. The --summary-first, -g and --diff-opts options have been dropped. The old-style non-fast-export reporting mode is still supported, but deprecated. In the future, it is possible that it may be dropped entirely. == Compiling == Do 'make' and 'make install'. This is very plain-vanilla ANSI C and should run on any Unixoid OS. == Testing == 'make check' runs a regression-test suite. == Known Bugs == Executable permissions on CVS files are not retrieved or reported. This could in theory be fixed - cvs update (mostly) does the right thing - but it would require figuring out how the very poorly dcumented CVS protocol transmits the information. == Running == Note: not all options are necessarily discussed here. Please check the output of 'cvsps -h' and/or the manual page for the most up-to-date info. a) General theory of operation CVSps operates by parsing 'cvs rlog' output fetched from the CVS server. To run it, you must be in the working directory of a cvs project. CVSps handles subdirectories fine, so run it in the top directory of your project. The --fast-export switch produces a git-style fast-import stream on standard output. The rest of this section describes the older default format intended for human inspection. b) Old-style changeset reporting CVSps's output is information about patchsets. A patchset looks like: --------------------- PatchSet 63 Date: 2001/03/09 18:21:15 Author: sneakums Branch: sneakums-nasty-hack Tag: (none) Branches: Log: First steps towards separating rfk from it nki source. The primary aim is to rough out the interface, specified in nki.h. Expect the implementation to suck. Members: src/Makefile.am:1.6->1.6.2.1 src/messages.h:1.9->1.9.2.1 src/nki.c:1.1->1.1.2.1 src/nki.h:1.1->1.1.2.1 src/robotfindskitten.c:1.15->1.15.2.1 --------------------- This patchset report shows the date, the author, log message and each file that was modified. For each file the pre-commit and post-commit revisions are given. You can also see if the files are on a branch, as well as the tag (see TAGS below). Patchsets are ordered by commit timestamp, so as long as the clock on your CVS server is monotonic, the numbering of patchsets should be invariant. (see COMPATIBILITY below). c) Limiting the patchset output. The default output of CVSps is to show all patchsets. This can be filtered in one of many ways. These flags can be combined to really limit the output to what you're interested in. By patch-set number. With the -s you can specify individual PatchSets by number or by range. Ranges can be of the form '', '-', '-' and of course '-'. Multiple ranges can be specified seperated by commas. E.g. cvsps -s 999-1020,1025,4956- By author. With the -a flag you limit the output to patchsets committed by a given author. The author is usually the UNIX login id. By file. With the -f flag you limit the output to patchsets that have modified the given file. Because a regular expression can have many pieces 'or'ed together, you can specify many different files here, for example (note also the use of the ^ character): cvsps -f '^net/ipv4|^net/core' By date. With one date specification, CVSps shows only patchsets newer than the date given, and with two dates, it shows patchsets between the two dates. *NOTE ON DATE FORMAT*. The preferred date format is in RFC3339 style: 'yyyy-mm-dd-Thh:mm:ss'; 'yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss' is also accepted. In both cases time is given as localtime and hh is in 24 hour format. CVS tends to display times as GMT, but parse dates as localtime, so when using the '-D' with cvs you need to convert from GMT to localtime in your head. CVSps is not as fancy. It treats all dates as if in localtime, and therefore you give CVSps dates the same way it gives them to you. But note that --fast-export exports git-style UTC times. By branch. With the -b flag you limit the output to patchsets that have modified the history of the given branch. Note, this doesn't necessarily mean the commit itself was made on the branch, since the files in question may have existed prior to the branch point, in which case changes made to a given file before the branch point affect the file as it exists in the head of the branch. If you want to restrict to the main branch, use a branch of 'HEAD'. By log comment. With the -l flag you can limit the ouptut to patchsets with the commit message matching the regex. By tag. With the -r -r you can limit the patchsets to commits after a given tag1 and, optionally, before tag2. d) what is timestamp fuzz factor (-z option)? There's another annoying feature of CVS. When you commit a large change, the timestamp on the change is created per file committed. For example: if you commit changes to 60 files on a slow server, taking, say, 60 seconds, the 'commit time' as given in the log message for the first file will differ from that of the last file by 60 seconds. The fuzz factor attempts to workaround this by saying: commits by the same author, using the same log message, within seconds are considered part of the same patchset. The default fuzz is 300 seconds (5 minutes). == TAGS == Please read the manual page. == COMPATIBILITY == One of the main goals of cvsps was to make the patchset numbering stable across all time, as long as no funny-business is done to the repository files themselves. Unfortunately, as bugs have been fixed, the numbering has changed. This is most regrettable, but unavoidable. Additionally, in version 2.0, two changes have been made which will 'renumber' the patch sets. 1) The false 'globbing' of two commits from nearly the exact same time, by the same person, with the same log description but to different branches. Now, these will be reported as 2 patchsets instead of one. 2) The creation of a large volume of patchsets for 'file xyz was originally added on branch' log messages. This occurs whenever a file is originally born on a branch, and is exacerbated by the fact that even when all of these files are created with a single commit, the 'file xyz...' messages, which contains the actual file name, are different, causing a proliferation of these unwanted patchsets. These patchsets are now silently eliminated from the output. == Known Problems (this will become the FAQ if anyone ever A any Q). == 1) What is the '*** file xyz doesn't match strip_path abc' error? This error occurs when one of the subdirectories of the directory you ran CVSps in is checked out from a different repository. CVSps tries to remove the repository path information from the filenames that it gets to give you working-directory local pathnames. It does this at startup by parsing the CVS/Root and CVS/Repository files. If the contents of these two files is different for some subdirectory, all of the files in that subdirectory will be ignored. You can always run CVSps in that subdirectory, and since it IS a separate repository, that does make a little bit of sense. //end