Re: normalizing files and old revisions

[Andreas Klauer]

On Sunday 31 August 2003 20:47, Max Bowsher wrote:
> Andreas Klauer wrote:
> > Any hints on how to do this?
>
> Write a script that walks an RCS file, and for each revision, generates the
> fulltext from the stored diffs, pipes the fulltext through your filter,
> diffs it against the previous revision, and writes out the new form.
> Don't forget to use the "next" properties to handle branches correctly.
>
> I.e. - not a trivial task.

First, thank you for your reply. :-)

The parsing of the RCS files should be trivial enough, the format does not 
look too complicated to me. Of course, I haven't yet read the rcsfile-manpage 
thoroughly enough, so I could be mistaken.

However, I seem to have a problem with the diffs, considering keywords, 
especially the $Log$ keyword. All my files contain this keyword, and 
naturally, my own diffs contain the automatic changes to this log in every 
revision. However, the original diffs don't, or only do, if someone actually 
modified the log directly in the file. I'm pretty sure that my diffs will 
mess up things if they contain log changes.

I've read the docs (12.5 Problems with the $Log$ keyword, 
cederqvist-1.11.6.html#SEC103) but it didn't quite help me out in this case.

So, my (hopefully not too stupid) question is:
How can I create diffs exactly the same way CVS does, without considering the 
$Log$ and other keyword's stuff?

TIA again,
Andreas