How can I revert a whole project to an earlier tag in CVS?

Question

I have a poject that has thousands of files. I made some changes that affected almost half of the files. the changes included editing existing files and adding new files and directories.

I need to revert all these changes and restore the project to how it was. I have created a tag before doing all this but I am not sure how I can restore the whole project from the tag

Answer 1

This is unfortunately the kind of thing that CVS is particularly not good at.

I do not believe that you can lose the history of your big commit (*) but rather you want to commit the reverse of your original changes (a revert in some SCM's terminology).

I recommend using non-CVS tools to determine what needs to be done and then just do the commits in CVS.

• Have two workspaces checked out. One checked out to the branch/HEAD and the other checked out to your tag.
• Create lists of files in each workspace and do the appropriate diffs (not cvs diff, just regular diff or comm or whatever you want for this) to get three lists: files you now need to Add and Delete.
• Do some diffs to find out what files you need to modify.
• cvs add the files that need adding. (Not sure if -kb is necessary when re-adding a file, probably not, but I'm not certain.)
• cvs rm the files that need deleting.
• Copy over the ones that need modifying and cvs commit -R them all at once.

If you have a log file that contain the details of your original big commit, you could also use that to create your list of add/delete/modify commands.

(*) Well, you could probably one-by-one use cvs admin to remove the new file versions, but I do not think that is advisable at all.