[cvsnt] Changing CVS Revision from 1.x to 2.X

[John Peacock]

Tony Hoyle wrote:
> Revision numbers are for the internal use of RCS.  The only reason they're
> useful at all is for pinpointing individual revisions of a file.  

And that is perfectly acceptable.  Under Perl, the module version in the 
Makefile.PL typically comes from a specific file.  The $Revision: $ of that one 
file can quite successfully be used as the entire package version (I know 
because I do so).

The RCS Revision number has all of the elements necessary for use as a version 
number: monotonically increasing subversions; branches automatically sort in 
ascending order with their original branch point.  Tags are a comment only and 
have have no defined syntax, and hence can be easily messed up by the sloppy 
programmer.

> should emphatically *never* be changed by an end user - if you don't know
> what you're doing you can create a situation where there are orphan
> branches which can't be retrieved using normal means.

Just for my amusement, could you describe in detail how this can be done.  I 
always merge branches before changing the $Revision: $ to the next whole number 
on all files in the module.  I have not in practice been required to maintain 
both a current and previous release, so I may not be aware that I am cutting off 
earlier revisions by my actions.

> 
> There is no practical use of changing them, unless you're trying to give
> them some kind of significance they don't have.  Use tags - that's what
> they're there for.  

Except that tags are not available as a keyword macro are they?  Without a way 
to programmatically access that information (say as part of a release script), 
tags are less than useless.  The other obvious disadvantage is that tags are 
slow to create in large projects, by the very nature of the RCS file format.

I have the skeleton of a release script for use with Subversion where the 
package version is stored as a custom attribute and incremented/tagged by the 
script.  Subversion does not maintain a Revision on each file, but rather 
globally on the repository itself.