Quick Reference: cvs2cl

CVS is a primitive and unfriendly tool for version control (at least in my experience).

Gladly there is a tool called cvs2cl that makes it easier to manage the log files.

Here are the key concepts

1)Install cvs and cvs2cl (both available through sudo apt-get install commands)
2)Checkout the version you want into a directory
3) cd  
4) in this directory execute cvs2cl command

cvs2cl -T  gives out the changes in chronologically reverse order with locations where tags first appeared. But a word of caution, the tag here means, where a tag was first encountered as it appears in the logfile.

I tried
cvs2cl -T --chrono . But it gives out  inaccurate or even incorrect information here. Since, all it is doing is reversing the log file, and not really checking out information in reverse order

The option --xml outputs in xml format.

The overall command to track changes in trunk only with tag information when the tag first occurred (reverse chronological order) use this

cvs2cl --xml --no-wrap --summary --T -S -r --follow-only trunk

Each file in cvs is in a particular state, that is encoded in tag in the xml file. Meaning of file state is "Exp" most of the time and stands for experimental. Since we are tracking most of the files will be exp state, but in a release branch you might find "stab" for stable version of the file.

Hope this helps