Anyone out there know much about CVS?

[andrewducker]

My current project has a CVS repository, and once a day it's my job to go through all of the changes and make sure nobody has done anything unusually dumb.

At the moment we generate a report with all of the changes, along with file names, committer, comment, etc.  But then I have to go through each file by hand to see what the changes were, which is dull and frustrating.

Is there anything out there that would allow me to do it all in one place?

Current tooling - Visual Studio 2005.  I have Eclipse as well though.

Comments along the lines of "CVS suxors!" are not helpful.  Corporate Standards are slow to change, and this one will at some point.  Meanwhile I have a job to do...

Comments

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Surely you just want to do
cvs diff -D2010-01-26
to see everything that's changed since yesterday?

[andrewducker]

Aha! Thanks. Not even slightly pretty, but I can browse through that quickly and look up just the ones that are interesting.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

You can have the diffs in context format by adding '-C', which I usually find is much more useful.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Have you asked ISAM SCM what tools are available? They're very helpful people and may provide an already existing in-house solution.

AND CVS is CRAP, AWFUL, DREADFUL and should never have been allowed to exist

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

(Sorry I have my unavailable flag on in IM but I'm at home working on crappy admin type work which means I have to be wholly unavailable to the world in general.

[andrewducker]

I've just switched to using Eclipse for it, which shows me just the files I want, and when I click on them shows me the differences. Not as nicely as Beyond Compare would, but better than nothing.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Well, if you already have a favourite comparison tool that works with the local filesystem, you could maintain two checkouts, one from a day ago and one from today, and compare them with that? :)

[andrewducker]

That's actually a genius suggestion, in a mad kind of way. I'll try that tomorrow and see what happens.

The alternative is to write something which does it for me - cvs commands don't look that hard, I'm sure I could write something to get the list of different files, put them in a tree, and then show me the differences for each one when I select it.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

All version control systems suck to some degree or other. If anyone ever suggests you replace it with PVCS, leave the building at high velocity, screaming.

[zz]

all i know about CVS is that it exists, is bad, and that TortoiseCVS exists.

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

i thought you said CVs as in resumes, and was all excited.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Is that the same as unified diffs? Those are the best.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Git is ace.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Perl.

[andrewducker]

Does Perl even _do_ GUIs?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yup; I wrote a thing with Perl and Tk I think ages ago. This was on Windows.

On something like Gnome there are bindings too.

I figured you were on the command line and wanted text output though... I'm not entirely clear on what you want, but it sounds like parsing the log output from CVS to see which files have actually been touched is part of it.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oh, and: there is nothing Perl can't do!

http://www.bastichlabz.org/bastich/Strips/ba980225.gif

[andrewducker]

I strongly suspect I'll write it in C#, as I can knock together a screen really quickly in that, and it does all the parsing I need (i.e. it supports regex)

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Almost but not quite the same. Where a change can't be shown as simple additions or deletions, context diff format shows both versions with changed lines highlighted with '!'. Makes it slightly easier to see what's going on with complex change sets.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

We use CVSSpam (and a significant amount of perl around and about it) so folks can register for HTML mails whenever someone commits something to CVS. These include the tree of changed files with links to the (nicely coloured) diffs.

We also use it to generate HTML mails from CVS diffs for pre-commit code reviews. Just because we're like that around here.

[(Anonymous)]

Don't you have some kind of Continuous Integration build - CruiseControl.Net or similar?? If not this will do the job, and more.

[andrewducker]

We have Hudson. It produces a list of changes, but it doesn't let me view them all in one place with a nice tool like Beyond Compare.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

ViewVC is a simple CGI script. Plunk it down on a webserver that has access to the CVS repo, give it the location of the CVS repo, and you can do diffs in a simple and graphical way.

Once you've got ViewVC running, modify your report to change the file name to be a ViewVC link to the file with a diff to the previous version. For bonus points, add a button at the bottom to cause Firefox to open a single window with each diff in a different tab.

For bonus bonus points: Hook CVS into your bug tracking, and have it drop a comment into the bug that the commit message lists, which includes the list of files and the links to the diffs.

[andrewducker]

Oooh. We have ViewCVS on a server here - not that I have access to it.

Worth taking a look at it though. Thanks!

[andrewducker]

We used to have PVCS as our standard for document storage. Thankfully, no more.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

ViewCVS is what ViewVC used to be called. The new version is the same thing, just named differently - and, really, most people rename it ViewCVS for legacy reasons.

But yes. Quite neat, if you do the integration. Useful, even without the integration.

[andrewducker]

I actually find it most useful as a place for putting files that anyone in the company can reach. Aaaah, workarounds.

[andrewducker]

See latest post :->