How can I Recover from Erroneous Checkins?

[Deja User]

A problem I encounter quite often among my CVS users is when
they do a massive erroneous checkin (cvs ci -m "some comment" .) and then need 
to roll back. (For instance by being in the wrong directory at the time of 
checkins) My users simultaneously work on several different projects so that's 
why this happens a lot.

Is there are a good easy way to do this? Could anyone share any ideas? 
Basically what I am looking for is a command like "REMOVE ALL THE REVISIONS 
USER X HAS DONE IN THE LAST 5 MIN FROM EVERYWHERE). The way I have been doing 
it is extremely painful and described below, 

a) see which files were revised in the repository in the last 10 min (cvs log 
-D) by this user

b) checkout the entire project. 


c) For each file cd into the subdir of the project where the file resides and 
do "cvs update -p -r previous_rev > file_name" then try to check in this result 
of overwriting with -p.  (This is the painful step since the erroneous checking 
was often done at the top of the project and the offending files are scattered 
all over)


I know the cvs way is to keep the wrong version in the history and checkin the 
right one on top. But in my case this approach I need to just remove the wrong 
head revisions as if they were never there otherwise my revision hitstory ends 
up being littered with erroneous checkings and then checkings that are fixes to 
those checkins. 

Should I use rcs -o ? Should I do it using rcs or cvs admin? Can anyone tell me 
what would be a safe way to do what I want?



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