Re: The hated $Log$ keyword

[Eric Siegerman]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 04:12:30AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Monday, July 9, 2001 at 00:01:01 (-0400), Eric Siegerman wrote: ]
> Well, with CVS the meaning of "frozen" file is quite a bit different.
> 
> In the most basic sense what I'm saying is that "-kv" should be the
> default for "cvs export".

Ah, now I get it.  Agreed -- except that it shouldn't override
"-kb" of course.

>                                      This option is useful for
>               software  distribution.  A revision that is sent to
>               several sites should be  checked  in  with  the  -k
>               option at these sites to preserve the original num-
>               ber, date, author, and state.
> 
> In practice I don't think this scheme has ever worked very well unless
> all sites in question had an agreed upon branching plan 

Or even if there was only one site.  I tried this with a couple
of open-source things I downloaded, and quickly ran into the
problem of new files going in at 1.1 instead of 5.1 or whatever.
Same problem that makes "cvs ci -r2" not very useful.

> Of course in both CVS and RCS the ultimate problem with having the
> keyword markers in the frozen files is that subsequent checkins/imports
> to a new repository (without '-k') will clobber the old value.  This is
> why '-kv' should be the default for "cvs export", and why large projects
> using RCS (or those using CVS who haven't learned to use "cvs export")
> have always invented their own project-specific keyword (eg. $NetBSD,
> $Xconsortium, $XFree86, etc.)

One way to solve this would be to make the vendor branch a
special case.  When checking out a file (whether with "co" or
"update"), if you're getting it from the vendor branch, override
the file's keyword-substitution setting and just do "-ko".

So when I import the CVS sources (for e.g.) and do a fresh
checkout, my sandbox will contain the original $Id$ values that
were in the distribution.  When I modify and commit some file,
*only* that file will now contain $Id$ values of the revision
from my repo.

(Ideally -kb should trump this wrinkle, as it should all other
check-out-time -k settings, but that's another story.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea.
        - RFC 1925 (quoting an unnamed source)