Question

I have been scouring the CVS man page for a while now, but am not able to follow what this CVS command is meant to do exactly. There appears to be multiple listings for -F in the man page, Im not sure if this is being used to specify a log file or regex or what. Is it merging ${newTag} into ${mainTag} or is constantPerl the tag? mainTag is defined as ‘Production’ and newTag is passed in as an argument to the script that runs this:

cvs -d /home/main/cvs rtag -r ${newTag} -F ${mainTag} constantPerl

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I have not used CVS since a long time ago.

According to the help, your command

• uses /home/main/cvs as repository
• creates a remote tag (I can’t remember the difference between a local and a remote tag)
• uses newTag as the revision which is used to create the new tag
• uses mainTag as the name for the new tag name
• specifies with -F that any pre-existing tag with the same name as of the now to be created one will be moved to point to the current revision (specified with -r ${newTag}
• create the tag only in the constantPerl module, but not in others.

 

$ cvs --help rtag
Usage: cvs rtag [-abdFflnR] [-r rev|-D date] tag modules...
    -a  Clear tag from removed files that would not otherwise be tagged.
    -b  Make the tag a "branch" tag, allowing concurrent development.
    -B  Allows -F and -d to disturb branch tags.  Use with extreme care.
    -d  Delete the given tag.
    -F  Move tag if it already exists.
    -f  Force a head revision match if tag/date not found.
    -l  Local directory only, not recursive.
    -n  No execution of 'tag program'.
    -R  Process directories recursively.
    -r rev  Existing revision/tag.
    -D  Existing date.
(Specify the --help global option for a list of other help options)