[cvsnt] Several questions on cvs usage

[Chuck Kirschman]

You missed the point.  cvs status is documented in the manual, but no 
where that I could find does anyone ever say "use this to determine 
which files you have changed".  They do say that about cvs -nq up.  If 
you'll recall back to the start of this thread, Tom's whole problem is 
that he doesn't know how to get a list of the files he has changed. 
That is a very important operation in any RCS, and it should be 
documented as to how it is done.  I'm not knocking the CVS documentation 
on this; it does document the command.  But there are a number of 
guides, books, and quick references that don't seem to refer to cvs stat 
as the technique for determining this information.  So the deprecation 
of cvs -nq up and its replacement seem to be one of the best kept 
secrets of this program.  I'm just glad that you were able to divine 
this information based on Tony saying that update doesn't support -n.  I 
definitely didn't make that leap.

More importantly to me, what is "globally un-ignore"?  This sounds very 
useful.  I want it to globally un-ignore everything except the CVS files 
and directories.  Junk in the source tree is always, always wrong.  It 
is the sign of an errant build process, or worse.  I have "update -I!" 
in my .cvsrc, but -I! doesn't work with "cvs status".  And it means that 
update won't ignore the CVS directories and .# files, which are the only 
acceptable things.

Thanks
chuck

Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
> Chuck Kirschman wrote:
> 
> 
>>It's interesting that "cvs status -q" is all but undocumented.  Most of 
>>information on Google is about issues, not about using it.  
> 
> 
> The search I usually use first for cvsnt questions:
> 
> <http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cvsnt.org%2Fmanual%2Fhtml%2F+status>
> <http://tinyurl.com/35sfmh>
> 
> Has this as second link:
> 
> <http://www.cvsnt.org/manual/html/status.html>
> 
> Which contains:
> 
> ---------------------------
> status options
> [...]
> -q
> 
>     Display only a quick summary of the status of each file. Specifying a
> second -q option reduces the output still further, by supressing output for
> up to date files.
> ---------------------------
> 
> FWIW and IMO, Google is becoming worse and probably never was a good
> replacement for a manual (where there is one, of course :)
> 
> 
> 
>>I'll give it a whirl, but I still dislike the fact that it doesn't
>>support -I!. 
>>
>>If there are ANY files in my source tree that aren't part of the source,
>>I want to know about it.  
> 
> 
> Why don't you globally un-ignore .exe and .dll and other files you don't
> normally have in your build tree? That should give you what you want.
> 
> Gerhard