Re: Looking for *real* docs

[David H. Thornley]

Chris wrote:
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> I'm trying to write some code to allow you to browse a repository. Crucial
> to this is thorough documentation of how to query the repository for name &
> message information (through using 'log', I guess), as well as
> documentation for the output of such commands, so I can parse it. I've read
> man pages for rcs, rlog, and cvs, along with additional online material
> including the Perdeqvist (sp) thingee, and I can't find anything, or even a
> reference to what I'm looking for.
> 
I looked at the output for "cvs stat -v" and picked out the
lines of output that contained information I wanted, and made
Perl regexps that would extract it.  Nothing fancy.  I didn't,
and don't, know of a better way to do this.

As far as I know, there is no defined way to read this information. 
This way suffers from the possibility that a future revision will
change the output (AFAIK, there are no guarantees anywhere that
this will not happen), but I'm the guy who recommends when to
install new versions, and evaluates them, so I figure I can always
change the scripts to accomodate any changes.


> There are several add-on tools that do this, and I could plow through their
> source if need be, but I'd rather not - I'd rather read what the
> tool-makers read, whatever that is.
> 
Reasonable question, but the answer is that you've found all
the documentation I have.

-- 
David H. Thornley                          Software Engineer
at CES International, Inc.:  address@hidden or (763)-694-2556
at home: (612)-623-0552 or address@hidden or
http://www.visi.com/~thornley/david/