CVS hacking

A couple weeks ago I ended up doing some digging around in CVS because of an issue a coworker was having with Eclipse (it turned out that he was running an older version of Eclipse under Windows, which was broken by our move to CVS 1.12.x, when he moved to Eclipse 3.0, his problems went away). In the process, I finally found the command that Eclipse was issuing to generate a top level listing of the CVS tree. I'd wanted this as a basic CVS command for quite some time.

The next day, Herb (another coworker) and I talked about it and he did some fiddling around. The result was his finding that the current directory needs a CVS directory (as all directories checked out from CVS normally have) containing both an Entries and Repository file, each with a blank line. Armed with that information, I eventually got around to creating a basic shell script to dump the top level CVS repository information and posted it internally on Sunday evening. When I mentioned it on Monday, Herb said he'd already seen it, and found a way to get a listing in any directory (in retrospect it was obvious both times, but I didn't see it).

I then passed it along to a couple other coworkers with a vested interest in CVS. Sudish wrote back at the end of the day with a fix for cygwin and shortly afterward, with a better way to deal with the output and perform a single pass against awk (I wasn't aware that you could do that).

The 1.0 script, can be downloaded here (the code is below). In general, directory names end in "/" and files don't; hardly unique, and a lot of people understand it.

#!/bin/sh
#
#   Dave Ely, Herb Hrowal and Sudish Joseph
#   Monday, August 9, 2004
#
#   cvsDump [some/cvs/directory/]
#

if [ -z $CVSROOT ] ; then
    echo "CVSROOT must be set."
    exit 1
else
    cvsDir="$1"
    if [ ! -z $cvsDir ] ; then
        if [ "/" = $cvsDir ] ; then
        cvsDir=""
        fi
    fi
    echo "CVS dump for $CVSROOT/$cvsDir"
    
    tempDir=`mktemp -d /tmp/cvs-list-XXXXXXXXXXX` || exit 1
    oldDir=`pwd`
    cd $tempDir
    
    mkdir CVS
    echo > CVS/Entries
    echo $cvsDir > CVS/Repository

    echo
    cvs -n update -d 2>&1 \
      | awk '/^U/ { print $2 } \
        /New directory/ { print substr( $5, 2, length( $5 )-2 ) "/" }' \
      | sort
    echo
    cd "$oldDir"
    rm -r $tempDir
fi
exit 0

As an example, here's a partial top level dump from cvs.apache.org...

dely@bigal $ cvsDump /
CVS dump for :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic/

CVSROOT/
ant-antidote/
ant/
apache-1.2/
apache-1.3/
apache-apr/
apache-devsite/
apache-nspr/
apache-search-site/
apache-site/
apmail/
apr-dist/
apr-iconv/
apr-prngd/
apr-site/
apr-util/
apr/
asf-site/
avalon-components/
avalon-excalibur/
avalon-logkit/

.. and so on ...

Followed by a dump of asf-site/ (also from cvs.apache.org).

dely@bigal $ cvsDump asf-site/
CVS dump for :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic/asf-site/

.htaccess
FAQ.html
Y2K.html
board/
bylaws.html
committers.html
conferences.html
contact.html
contributing.html
credits.html
docs/
donations.html
hardware-notes.html
images/
index.html
left-cell.html
mail-response.html
mailinglists.html
members-projects.html
members.html
news.html
preFAQ.html
press/
projects.html
records/
svc-name-template.html