CVS Changes

A development project will generally be divided into logical tasks, for example, fixing a particular bug in a software project or adding a web page to a web site project. Often you will want to be able to track such tasks, or "changes", through a development process. Later you may wish to see the history of what was modified as part of each change.

Some aspects of change control can be handled completely outside CVS, using a tracking system such as GNATS or Jitterbug. One way to connect such a system to CVS is to require CVS log messages to contain a valid bug number. For details, see the CVS documentation for the "verifymsg" feature of CVS.

But really you would like CVS to remember that checkins to several files were made as part of the same logical change. One way to do this with CVS is to create a tag before and after each checkin (generally via some kind of custom front-end to CVS).

For More Information

One nice example of a system built on top of tags is at Undernet (it uses a slight variation of the before and after tags - an after tag plus a checkin to the dummy file ".patches" which keeps track of the order of the changes).

Aegis is a configuration management system with better support for changes than CVS has.

Our development ideas page also briefly discusses changes, with an emphasis on features that might be added to CVS in this area.