That's true about blending <STDERR> and <STDOUT> in the CVS command itself, but I don't want to mix up STDERR and STDOUT.

I process STDOUT for the names of the files and the changes. The flow is pretty straight forward on finding the comments (likes after /^date:/ begin a comment. Comments end with a /^(-|=)+$/. If STDERR was included in the mix, it makes it much harder to separate out that information.

I also depend upon the fact that when a file isn't tagged with either release, the two lines that report this information appear one after the other in <STDERR>. This makes it very easy to determine when a file has one tag, but not the other (which means it was either added or deleted from the current release). If <STDOUT> and <STDERR> were merged, I could no longer make that assumption.