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Once you have used CVS to store a version control history--what files have changed when, how, and by whom, there are a variety of mechanisms for looking through the history.
Whenever you commit a file you specify a log message.
To look through the log messages which have been
specified for every revision which has been committed,
use the cvs log command (see section log--Print out 'rlog' information for files).
You can use the history file (see section The history file) to
log various CVS actions. To retrieve the
information from the history file, use the cvs
history command (see section history--Show status of files and users).
You can customize CVS to log various kinds of
actions, in whatever manner you choose. These
mechanisms operate by executing a script at various
times. The script might append a message to a file
listing the information and the programmer who created
it, or send mail to a group of developers, or, perhaps,
post a message to a particular newsgroup. To log
commits, use the `loginfo' file (see section Loginfo).
To log commits, checkouts, exports, and tags,
respectively, you can also use the `-i',
`-o', `-e', and `-t' options in the
modules file. For a more flexible way of giving
notifications to various users, which requires less in
the way of keeping centralized scripts up to date, use
the cvs watch add command (see section Telling CVS to notify you); this command is useful even if you are not
using cvs watch on.
The `taginfo' file defines programs to execute
when someone executes a tag or rtag
command. The `taginfo' file has the standard form
for administrative files (see section Reference manual for the Administrative files), where each line is a regular expression
followed by a command to execute. The arguments passed
to the command are, in order, the tagname,
operation (add for tag,
mov for tag -F, and del for
tag -d), repository, and any remaining are
pairs of filename revision. A non-zero
exit of the filter program will cause the tag to be
aborted.
Command: cvs annotate [-lf] [-r rev|-D date] files ...
For each file in files, print the head revision of the trunk, together with information on the last modification for each line. For example:
$ cvs annotate ssfile Annotations for ssfile *************** 1.1 (mary 27-Mar-96): ssfile line 1 1.2 (joe 28-Mar-96): ssfile line 2
The file `ssfile' currently contains two lines.
The ssfile line 1 line was checked in by
mary on March 27. Then, on March 28, joe
added a line ssfile line 2, without modifying
the ssfile line 1 line. This report doesn't
tell you anything about lines which have been deleted
or replaced; you need to use cvs diff for that
(see section diff--Run diffs between revisions).
These standard options are available with
annotate (see section Common command options, for a complete
description of them):
-D date
-f
-l
-r tag
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