cvs2cl.pl

# cvs2cl.pl: A script for converting CVS log messages to ChangeLog files.

The latest version is 2.73, released 17 May, 2008.

NOTICE (2010-12-02): cvs2cl is in maintenance mode. Martyn Pearce stepped down years ago after a long and successful stint as cvs2cl's maintainer (thanks, Martyn!).

The original author, Karl Fogel, continues to accept patches. The most recent patch, applied on 2011-11-10, was from Yuri Lebedev, adding the '--xml-stylesheet' option. If you use cvs2cl a lot and are interested in becoming the new maintainer, please say so.

## Overview

cvs2cl is Perl script that does what you think it does: it produces a GNU-style ChangeLog for CVS-controlled sources, by running "cvs log" and parsing the output. Duplicate log messages get unified in the Right Way. There is also XSLT available to convert the ChangeLog output to HTML.

A bug status page for cvs2cl may be found here

Otherwise, you can download the latest version of the script, or get it via CVS thusly:

          cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.red-bean.com:/usr/local/cvs co cvs2cl

Note that by using `perldoc`, you can review a full manpage for cvs2cl:

`perldoc cvs2cl.pl`

If you have a bug to report, please mail it to `bug-cvs2cl at red-bean dot com`, including the command-line you executed, what you expected to happen, how what you got differed from this, and a small output of cvs log that may be used to recreate the problem. A patch to fix the issue is especially welcome.

### XML Mode & XSLT, XSD

cvs2cl is capable of producing XML output.

David Carlson (`davidwcarlson at hotmail dot com`) has come up with a draft dtd and schema for cvs2cl's XML output.

Here's an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Daniel Ciaglia (`daniel at ciaglia dot de`), that's a variant on the html XSLT below, with the following amendments:

- DOCTYPE changed to HTML 4.01;
- removed the xmlns:cvs2cl definition
- switched encoding to iso-8859-1

Example output from this stylesheet may be seen here Daniel also contributed a bash script to use with XSLT transformations.

Here's a development of Daniel's stylesheet kindly donated by Alexander Ruether that features:

- Colored headlines
- Convert linefeeds to <br>
- via javascript you can show/hide the concerned files

Here's an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Joseph Walton (`joe at kafsemo dot org`) that generates RSS output from changelogs in XML mode (requires 2.51 for the isoDate patch).

Here's an XSL stylesheet that kind donator Nicolas Karageuzian (`nicolas at karageuzian dot com`) describes as "quick and dirty", that generates rss and html using a table with colour changing for files

Here's a simple xslt (1.0) example for converting the XML output to XHTML. It really is a very simple example, for I am no expert: it's just a starting point. If anybody else has a nicer application to share, please send it to the bug address, and I'll post it here.

Here's an XSD, kindly donated by Yury Lebedev (`yurylebedev at mail dot ru`), that can translate cvs2cl.pl's XML output into DataSet from MS dotNet Framework or can be used to validate/transform XML output data types in DOM document. Instead of XDR, this XSD can be used 'as is' without any modification of XML output - it's necessary only attach this XSD as separate 'schema' for 'http://www.red-bean.com/xmlns/cvs2cl/' namespace before loading such XML into a DOM document (depending on used XML parser implementation).

## Recent Developments

- Monday, 23rd April 2007:

  2.62 released, with several bugfixes:

  - One by Gary Duzan to tolerate dot when matching tag names.
  - One by Alexey Panchenko to support Windows output paths better.
  - Another by Alexey Panchenko to call subprocesses on Windows correctly.
- Wednesday, 17th May 2005:

  2.59 released, with one bugfix.

- Sunday, 7th Novemmber 2004:

  2.58 released, with several bugfixes

- Saturday, 10th July 2004:

  2.57 released, with several bugfixes; most notably to handle the date output from the new cvs 1.12.9 server.

- Saturday, 15th May 2004:

  2.54 released, with a couple of new features. An XSLT donated by Alexander Ruether was also added.

- Sunday, 7th March 2004:

  2.53 released, a bugfix release

- Saturday, 6th March 2004:

  Added XSLT donated by Nicolas Karageuzian

- Tuesday, 20th January 2004:

  The structure of cvs2cl has been significantly altered with the release of 2.52, introducing a number of classes (all still within the one file), into which the major subroutines have been placed.

- Monday, 5th January 2004:

  Integrated Peter Palfrader's manpage (original) into the POD for cvs2cl.

- Tuesday, 9th December 2003:

  2.51 released. A new set of bug fixes, and a couple of minor features.

- Wednesday, 26th November 2003:

  Here's an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Joseph Walton (`joe at kafsemo dotorg`) generates RSS output from changelogs in XML mode (requires 2.51 for the isoDate patch).

- Monday, 25th August 2003:

  2.50 released. A new set of bug fixes, and a couple of minor features.

- Sunday, 24th August 2003:

  Here's a simple xslt (1.0) example for converting the XML output to HTML. It really is a very simple example, for I am no expert: it's just a starting point. If anybody else has a nicer application to share, please send it to the bug address, and I'll post it here.

- Saturday, 21st June 2003:

  2.49 released. A new set of bug fixes, and an improvement to the indenting style.

- Tuesday, 22nd April 2003:

  2.48 released. A stack of bugs have been fixed, and new features added

- Saturday, 23rd November 2002:

  A number of bugs have recently been fixed, and a new bugs-status page has been created

- Thursday, 23rd May 2002:

  Martyn J. Pearce is the new maintainer of cvs2cl. This site remains cvs2cl's home site, and bug reports, patches, suggestions & pizza coupons should still be sent to the `bug-cvs2cl at red-bean dot com` mailing list.

- David Carlson (`davidwcarlson at hotmail dot com`) has come up with a draft dtd and schema for cvs2cl's XML output.

## Examples

Here is cvs2cl.pl generating several flavors of its own ChangeLog.

Note that all of these invocations also used the "`--fsf`" option (omitted below for brevity), because a few log entries were written in FSF-style as an experiment.

1. | `cvs2cl.pl`
2. | `cvs2cl.pl --xml`
3. | `cvs2cl.pl --revisions`
4. | `cvs2cl.pl --tags`
5. | `cvs2cl.pl --branches`
6. | `cvs2cl.pl --tags --revisions`
7. | `cvs2cl.pl --branches --revisions`
8. | `cvs2cl.pl --tags --branches`
9. | `cvs2cl.pl --tags --branches --revisions`
10. | `cvs2cl.pl --tags --branches --revisions --usermap $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/users --day-of-week`

Running `cvs2cl.pl --help` will get you a thorough usage message, too.

## Links

Here are some links to related resources:

- The CVS Homepage
- cvs2html cvs2html is a program which converts CVS log data to HTML. It apparently organizes the data by file rather than by commit, which may be less or more useful than cvs2cl depending on your needs.
- CVSps CVSps is a program for generating 'patchset' information from a CVS repository. A patchset in this case is defined as a set of changes made to a collection of files, and all committed at the same time (using a single 'cvs commit' command). This information is valuable to seeing the big picture of the evolution of a cvs project. While cvs tracks revision information, it is often difficult to see what changes were committed 'atomically' to the repository.
- filter-cvs2cl.xslt This is an XSL stylesheet kindly donated by Joseph Walton (`joe at kafsemo dotorg`) generates RSS output from changelogs in XML mode (requires 2.51 for the isoDate patch).
- cl2html.xslt This is a simple xslt file as a starting point for converting the XML output of `cvs2cl.pl` to HTML. It really is just an example, and a pretty tatty one at that. If you enhance it, or have other examples of xslt for `cvs2cl.pl` (or, come to that, Enhanced DTD/Schema/RelaxNG, etc. for the cvs2cl.pl XML output), and are willing to share, please mail them to the bugs address, and they too will be posted here!
- cl2html.pl cl2html.pl converts the XML outputted by cvs2cl.pl's C<--xml> option to HTML or XHTML code. This is essentially similar to the XSLT above, but done in perl instead. Suitable for the more dromedarian among us.
- cvs2cl.pl used for the gentoo.org website "You'll remember that in Part 2 of this series I mentioned that the cvs2cl.pl CVS Changelog generation script (see Resources) could produce XML output and that I wanted to eventually use this feature as the basis for a daily CVS Changelog page that would appear on the new Web site. Now, with the new XML backend in place, adding the new Changelog page is a piece of cake. Here's an enhanced version of the cvslog.sh script that also takes care of handling the XML-to-HTML conversion:"

## Summarized Change History

2.58 | #50 Correct sense of --no-ancestors #79 Fix non-working --prune #80 Fix use of quotes in shell interpolation (that is, exec directly rather than using the shell). #81 Fix implementation of --ignore to match documentation (i.e., use regexen). #82 Fix implementation of branch recognition to handle branches with 10+ members. #83 Add tag dates to XML output.
2.57 | #75 Add patch to allow correct date format reading under cvs 1.12.9 #19 Fix regression of handling carriage returns with windows cvs log #76 Fix missing use of File::Basename in ChangeLog::FileEntry #77 Fix gecos handling to read getpwnam correctly
2.55 | New features: #73 Add --lines-modified option #74 Add --follow-only option
2.53 | Bug fixes: #71 (provide non-zero exit code if cvs log fails) #70 (eliminate unitialized value warnings with --follow) #69 (fix --gecos to cope if author is missing, or if gecos field lacks commas) #68 (fix -t -b to not die with a bad array dereference) #65 (formatting fixes for pod)
2.52 | New features: Factor out a number of classes to ease maintenance and clarify data-flow #65 (Reformat/Rewrite POD to form a valid manpage) Bug fixes: #66 (make --no-indent to not indent with --hide-filenames & --no-wrap)
2.51 | New features: #64 (Add --no-indent option) #60 (Add ISO date to XML output) Bug fixes: #61 (Add examples of date use) #63 (Partial implementation of group-within-date) #56 (avoid uninitialized value warnings with --gecos) Fix --FSF to not indent extra spaces #57 (remove Attic/ path from --rcs output (to match non-rcs output)) #59 (handle files with a space in their name that were added on a branch)
2.50 | New features: Sort tags on output to ensure determinism to assist in tests (and other change-check mechanisms). #52 (Add --noxmlns option) #49 (Interpret "[user@]host:/file/whatever" in -U option) Bug fixes: Undocument --update since it doesn't actually do anything useful. #51 (Remove additional newline from msg in XML mode) #46 (Better wrapping of filenames with --no-wrap) Implementation Changes: Change 'wrap' to 'mywrap' because Text::Wrap in perl 5.005_03 exports wrap unconditionally and generates an override warning
2.49 | New features: #47 (Don't show log entries for branch-file addition) #46 (Cosmetic Improvement to Indenting) #45 (Fix awkward wrapping on two-space sentence gap) #44 (Remove end-of-line whitespace being generated) #43 (Conflate --mailname/--domain) #42 (document --chrono flag) #41 (Recognize RCS File on Windoze boxen) #3 (Stop re-adding same logs with --accum --utc)
2.48 | New features: #40 (Add --summary option to summarize groups in terms of added, deleted & changed files) #39 (Add --update option to list only files that have changed since last run) #38 (Add --no-ancestors option to track only changes since a branch began) #37 (Add --show-dead option to record dead files in output) #36 (Add --rcs option to read raw rcs files) #35 (Add --passwd option to read details from passwd file) #35 (Add --mailname option to specify mail domain)
2.47 | New features: #33 (Document --delta flag) #32 (Add --gecos, --domain options to include email & gecos informatin) #29 (Add --FSF option to default output to FSF style) #28 (Add --no-common-dir option to disable common-directory clustering in file output) #26 (Add --show-tag option as opposite of --ignore-tag) #25 (Add --chrono option to write output in chronological order)
2.46 | New feature #24 (Option to not print HH:MM on timestamps)
2.45 | Fixes to bugs #19 (carriage returns wreak havoc on windoze) #22 (extra square brackets appeared on revision numbers) #23 (perl version hardwired)
2.44 | Fix to bug #18 (spurious `malformed utf-8 character' warnings emitted)
2.43 | Fixes to bugs #14 (conflict with --accum and -D) #11 (log tags with date the first tag occurred)
2.42 | Fix to bug #8 (delta option for trimming log between two tags)
2.41 | Fix to bug #5 (-W fails to handle argument '0')

## Authors & Contributors

#### Authors

- Karl Fogel
- Melissa O'Neill
- Martyn J. Pearce

#### Contributors

- Mike Ayers
- Tim Bradshaw
- Richard Broberg
- Nathan Bryant
- Oswald Buddenhagen
- Geo Carncross
- Neil Conway
- Martin Dorey
- Arthur de Jong
- Anne Dudfield
- Mark W. Eichin
- Dave Elcock
- Reid Ellis
- Steve Glow
- Simon Josefsson
- Robin Hugh Johnson
- Terry Kane
- Pete Kempf
- Akos Kiss
- Claus Klein
- Eddie Kohler
- Richard Laager
- Kevin Lilly
- Karl-Heinz Marbaise
- Christian Marquardt
- Mitsuaki Masuhara
- Henrik Nordstrom
- Joe Orton
- Peter Palfrader
- Thomas Parmelan
- Jordan Russell
- Jacek Sliwerski
- Johannes Stezenbach
- Joseph Walton
- Ernie Zapata