Dates in CVS

Dates can be specified in all of the following ways:

                   1 month ago
                   2 hours ago
                   400000 seconds ago
                   last year
                   last Monday
                   yesterday
                   a fortnight ago
                   3/31/92 10:00:07 PST
                   January 23, 1987 10:05pm
                   22:00 GMT

Dates seem to be completely orthogonal to tag names; they form another name space of tags. In fact, they are even sticky like tags: when you checkout a file from a particular date, cvs keeps that on the file when you commit it. (You must "cvs update -A" to remove the sticky date.) To checkout from a particular date,

    
    cvs co -D"January 25" spin/compiler/Makefile

"cvs history" can be used to find out when files were committed. Unfortunately, it seems that this includes commits to local branches. However, the output indicates in which directory the commit occurred, so it's pretty easy to tell if the commit was in a merge or for a branch.

    
    cvs history -c -a spin/compiler/Makefile

The "-c" means report on commits; the "-a" means all users; Here are some sample output lines from the above command:

    
  M 01/28 06:58 +0000 pardy   1.6.116.4           Makefile spin/compiler == /af
  s/cs.washington.edu/project/spin/pardy/spin-13
  M 01/28 22:47 +0000 savage  1.7                 Makefile spin/compiler == /af
  s/cs.washington.edu/project/spin/savage/s13
  M 01/29 23:36 +0000 savage  1.8                 Makefile spin/compiler == /af
  s/cs.washington.edu/project/spin/savage/s13
  M 10/31 07:26 +0000 whsieh  1.5.4.1             Makefile spin/compiler == /af
  s/cs.washington.edu/project/spin/whsieh/s5/spin/compiler

    
    cvs history -c -a -t spin-15 spin/compiler/Makefile

can be used to get all commit records after spin-15.

whsieh@cs.washington.edu
February 26, 1996