7.1. Tags--Symbolic revisions

The revision numbers live a life of their own. They need not have anything at all to do with the release numbers of your software product. Depending on how you use cvs the revision numbers might change several times between two releases. As an example, some of the source files that make up rcs 5.6 have the following revision numbers:

ci.c 5.21 co.c 5.9 ident.c 5.3 rcs.c 5.12 rcsbase.h 5.11 rcsdiff.c 5.10 rcsedit.c 5.11 rcsfcmp.c 5.9 rcsgen.c 5.10 rcslex.c 5.11 rcsmap.c 5.2 rcsutil.c 5.10

You can use the tag command to give a symbolic name to a certain revision of a file. You can use the `-v' flag to the status command to see all tags that a file has, and which revision numbers they represent.

The following example shows how you can add a tag to a file. The commands must be issued inside your working copy of the module. That is, you should issue the command in the directory where backend.c resides.

$ cvs tag release-0-4 backend.c
T backend.c

$ cvs status -v backend.c

===================================================================

File: backend.c         Status: Up-to-date


    Version:            1.4     Tue Dec  1 14:39:01 1992

    RCS Version:        1.4     /usr/local/cvsroot/yoyodyne/tc/backend.c,v

    Sticky Tag:         (none)

    Sticky Date:        (none)

    Sticky Options:     (none)


    Existing Tags:

        release-0-4                     (revision: 1.4)

There is seldom reason to tag a file in isolation. A more common use is to tag all the files that constitute a module with the same tag at strategic points in the development life-cycle, such as when a release is made.

$ cvs tag release-1-0 . cvs tag: Tagging . T Makefile T backend.c T driver.c T frontend.c T parser.c

(When you give cvs a directory as argument, it generally applies the operation to all the files in that directory, and (recursively), to any subdirectories that it may contain. See Recursive behavior.)

The checkout command has a flag, `-r', that lets you check out a certain revision of a module. This flag makes it easy to retrieve the sources that make up release 1.0 of the module `tc' at any time in the future:

$ cvs checkout -r release-1-0 tc

This is useful, for instance, if someone claims that there is a bug in that release, but you cannot find the bug in the current working copy.

You can also check out a module as it was at any given date. See checkout options.

When you tag more than one file with the same tag you can think about the tag as "a curve drawn through a matrix of filename vs. revision number." Say we have 5 files with the following revisions:

file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1 /--1.1* <-*- TAG 1.2*- 1.2 1.2 -1.2*- 1.3 \- 1.3*- 1.3 / 1.3 1.4 \ 1.4 / 1.4 \-1.5*- 1.5 1.6

At some time in the past, the * versions were tagged. You can think of the tag as a handle attached to the curve drawn through the tagged revisions. When you pull on the handle, you get all the tagged revisions. Another way to look at it is that you "sight" through a set of revisions that is "flat" along the tagged revisions, like this:

file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 1.1 1.2 1.1 1.3 _ 1.1 1.2 1.4 1.1 / 1.2*----1.3*----1.5*----1.2*----1.1 (--- <--- Look here 1.3 1.6 1.3 \_ 1.4 1.4 1.5

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