java work

How to save yourself from CVS branching hell : cvsgraph & viewcvs

One of the things I miss most from working with Clearcase at my previous company is branching information (I currently use CVS)

We use CVS with a "product development" philosophy : the HEAD branch has all the main development. At some point, we create a maintenance branch which has the first release for that version. For exemple we have an Xxx_5_2 branch which has all the maintenance version for the software : 5.2.0, 5.2.1, etc... This means that we can have one person fixing a bug, put it into production while at the same time developping new features.
When such a fix occures, we then merge back into HEAD... typical config management...

However, I find it fairly difficult to track what branches exist for a given file or, worst even, what merges occured. Imagine, one of those bug fixes is not merged... that would be very bad.
Up until now, we've been getting around that by being extra careful about how we run things around bug fixes and by commenting commits subsequent to a merge explicitly. But it's still not too great.

I happened to stumble across viewCVS and the latest cvsgraph and I finally have what I've been missing :) viewCVS is just a cvsweb clone into which you can plug cvsgraph.
CVSgraph displays a graph of all reversion, branches and tags very cleanly, it has lots of nice features like branch folding, only showing tagged revisions, etc...

The one thing that really got me going is automatic branching detection based on tag names. Suppose that when you release version 4.2.1 for example (remember it has to be on the maintenance branch for us) you tag it somehting like release_MYSOFTWARE_4_2_1. It's then easy to check it out cleanly.
Then you switch to your HEAD branch and merge it. You commit those changes and tag that branch merged__MYSOFTWARE_4_2_1. cvsGraph will then draw a little line between those two tag boxes to let you know that a merge occured.

The matching uses regular expressions so I suppose you can make up even more intricated schemes but I haven't fooled with that yet. I'd like to find a way to tag temporary branches and merges differently but that will be another post...