A while ago there was a discussion about how hard it would be to do
diff files nightly for those who haven't got access to sup.  I'm well
aware of the cost of cvs tagging and diffing, thus understand the load
it would put on sun-lamp doing a traditional "cvs rdiff".  Today I
thought of another way to tag the trees which ought to be as safe as
ordinary CVS tags, but much faster.  The idea, let's call it external
tagging, just makes use of the CVS Entries files.  Run something like
the following script nightly:

find . -name CVS -type d | while read d; do
  if [ -f $d/Entries ]; then
    awk -F / 'BEGIN { OFS = "" }
              {print "'`dirname $d`'/", $2, " ", $3}' $d/Entries
  fi
done |sort >tag-`date '+%y%m%d'`

This makes files with two fields per row, a filename and the RCS
version.  There is a row for every file in the tree.  Now, to get
patches from two of these external tag files is rather trivial, just
an hours worth of perl or shell hacking I'd say.  Comments?  If the
consensus is that this idea seem viable I volunteer to do the work.

Niklas

Niklas Hallqvist	Phone: +46-(0)31-40 75 00
Applitron Datasystem	Fax:   +46-(0)31-83 39 50
Molndalsvagen 95	Email: niklas@appli.se
S-412 63  GOTEBORG	WWW:   Here
Sweden