[cvsnt] Re: commit followed by a tag

[Matt Schuckmann]

I found the following reply from Tony in the daily digest, for some reason
it's not appearing in my news client so I can't reply to it directly.
> It wouldn't make sense - tags usually refer to whole trees of files, and
commits only to things that
> have changed. You could write a script that did one after the other...
normally though you tag later
> - after testing has determined that the branch is ready for promotion.

> Tony


My response is why doesn't it make sense? IMO it makes perfect sense, here
are a couple of senarios:

If a developer knows that a set of files he's commiting is all related to
one feature or fix or just wants to keep track of a set of changes he/she is
making to the trunk (or a branch) (i.e. create a Change Set) why should it
be a 2 step process to commit then tag. Every SCM system I've ever worked
with before has had the capability to apply a tag (or label) at the time of
commiting the file to the repository, it just makes sense.

This feature fits nicely into my orgainizations process.
When a developer is working on a feature or fix that feature or fix is
assigned a number.
It is that developers responsibility to tag any revisions that are
associated with that feature or fix with a tag of the form FIX## or FUNC##.
The developer might commit some files one day and some more files the next
day but they all are part of the same feature or fix.
This in effect creates a Change Set for that feature or fix that is
identified by the tag.

When the release manager goes to create a new build or release he decideds
what new features and fixes get added to the previous build (e.g. BLD11)..
The new build is then created by applying the new build tag (e.g. BLD12) to
all the revisions of the previous build plus the revisions with the desired
feature and fix labels. A few consistency checks are made to make sure we
aren't going backwards in the revision tree or that we aren't accidentally
pulling in part of a feature or fix that we don't want in the build yet. It
all works very well. There is generally no need for branching involved.

It appears that CVS doesn't preclude us from using this process but it is a
bit combersome and error prone to have to commit then tag.
I'm sure that I can write the script to do it automatically but I'm curious
why it isn't a feature of CVS already or why somebody else hasn't already
created the script.

Comments and suggestions are welcome and appriciated.

Thanks
Matt S.


<Matthew_Schuckmann at Etec.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.48.1107464148.282.cvsnt at cvsnt.org...
> Is there a way to apply a tag at the same time as a commit?
> With other SCM systems I have used labels/tags to create change sets but
> those systems allowed adding a tag at the same time as commit the changes.
> Is there anyway to do this with  CVSNT or winCVS? (I'm not opposed to
> scripts or WinCVS macros) Has anyone else done this? If not why not? it
> seems like a pretty basic and very useful feature.
>
> Thanks,
> Matt S.
>
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