markjugg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello!

Can anyone recommend a tool to take parse the log entries from CVS and transform them into a "user-friendly" version? I'm thinking that I could mark some changes as "New Feature" or "Bug Fix" and then parse the file for lines like that. I assume this is a wheel that's already been invented, but I can't find it so far. Thanks!

-mark

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Creating Changelogs from CVS with Perl
by BoredByPolitics (Scribe) on Jan 22, 2001 at 01:09 UTC
    I can recommend cvs2cl.pl which you can obtain here. If you want to see an example of it's output (beautified for html with my own wrapper script) then take a look at this page.

    Pete

[reply]
[d/l]
      Beautiful! That's a great start for me. Thanks!

      -mark

[reply]
Re: Creating Changelogs from CVS with Perl
by eg (Friar) on Jan 22, 2001 at 00:28 UTC

    You might give VCS::RCS a shot. Look at the various RCS modules while you're there, since CVS is built on top of RCS (I think.) Otherwise it doesn't look terribly hard to parse a CVS archive for logs (at worst it's little more than calling "cvs log" or "rlog" (might be faster) on the file and parsing that.)

[reply]
      I looked at the documentation for this, and there appear to be no functions there for manipulating the log file. Can you provide a more specific example of using VCS::RCS for this?

      -mark

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Re: Creating Changelogs from CVS with Perl
by meonkeys (Chaplain) on Jan 22, 2001 at 07:06 UTC
    Are you trying to track certain files in CVS by making specific comments in specific files? You should use a sticky tag:

    shell$ cvs tag interesting-v2 *

    [download]

    recursively tags everything in the current directory with a symbolic tag "interesting-v2". This can be retrieved when you check logs, update, whatever. I love that CVS.
[reply]
[d/l]
      I'm already using tags in CVS to track releases, such as cascade-1_3_5, cascade-1_3_6, etc. Then I want to perform actions like: "Show me all the new features and bug fixes since cascade-1_3_5 was released". I think the cvs2cl.pl script mentioned above is going to do most of what I want. Among other things, it can export the data it gathers as XML, so I should be able to use a standard XML parser to produce results in whatever form I like. It also points to a document on "Good ChangeLog Style" which was useful to read.

      -mark

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Re: Creating Changelogs from CVS with Perl
by enoch (Chaplain) on Jun 15, 2001 at 18:39 UTC
    I use CVS pretty extensively, and while I have not rolled my own comment viewer thingy, I find that cvsweb is a invaluable tool.

    Jeremy
[reply]

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