Re: CVS commits and logs

[Miles Bader]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>     Yes.  A single merge-commit to the unicode-2 branch represents many,
>     many changes on the trunk (hundreds of files, often multiple changes to
>     each file), so I don't include changelog info in the CVS log entry at
>     all.  The CVS log entry more or less says "merge from trunk of
>     changesets X-Y."
>
> That seems to make the file's CVS log rather useless.  Or is the idea
> that those changesets remain visible in the file's CVS log?  In that
> case, they are a sort of indirection to the other change log items,
> and that is ok.

Well, that sort of indirection is the idea, and it's currently
possible to find the source log entries, but not using CVS alone:  the
changeset information in the merge log refers to _arch_ changesets
(CVS doesn't even have the notion of a changeset), so one would have
to look in the arch repository to find the source log entries.

It would be possible to encode this information in CVS as well, by
making a unique CVS tag for each merge (the tag would be in the branch
merged _from_, so the log entry in the branch merged _to_ would say
basically merged from ..., see tag "trunk-merge-source-x-y-z").  That
would bloat the tag lists somewhat though, which might annoy people
(CVS spits out lists of tags at times, e.g. if you do "cvs log", and
if there are 10,000 almost identical tags ...).

Even with these tags, it would still be somewhat annoying for someone
to track down the exact original commit logs, but I don't think
there's really any practical alternative.

-Miles
-- 
`The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement'