Section 6.6. Finding Changes Between Versions

6.6. Finding Changes Between Versions

The cvstagdiff task generates an XML-formatted report file of the changes between two tags or dates recorded in a CVS repository. Here's an example that creates a report, datediff.xml, for all the changes that have been made in the GreetingApp module in January 2005:

<cvstagdiff     destfile="datediff.xml"     package="GreetingApp"     startDate="2005-01-01"     endDate="2005-31-01" />

You can see the attributes of this task in Table 6-8.

Table 6-8. The cvstagdiff task's attributes

Attribute	Description	Required	Default
compression	Specifies the compression you want to use. Set to true, false, or a number (1-9) for compression level.	No	No compression
cvsroot	Specifies the CVSROOT variable you want to use.	No
cvsrsh	Specifies the CVS_RSH variable you want to use.	No
destfile	Specifies the file where the report should be stored.	Yes
enddate	Sets the latest date for differences to still be included in the report.	One of the endtag or enddate
endtag	Sets the latest tag for differences to still be included in the report.	One of the endtag or enddate
failonerror	Makes the build fail if this task encounters an error.	No	false
package	Specifies the module you want to analyze. Since Ant 1.6, multiple modules can be separated by spaces.	Yes
passfile	Specifies the password file you want the task to read passwords from.	No	~/.cvspass
port	Specifies the port used to communicate with the CVS server.	No	port 2401
quiet	Specifies that you want to suppress displayed messages.	No	false
startdate	Sets the earliest date for differences to still be included in the report.	One of starttag or startdate
starttag	Sets the earliest tag for differences to still be included in the report.	One of starttag or startdate

Here's something useful to know: Ant comes with an XSLT stylesheet, ${ant.home}/etc/tagdiff.xsl, that you can use to generate a HTML report based on this task's XML output. Here's an example:

<style in="datediff.xml"      out="datediff.html"      style="${ant.home}/etc/tagdiff.xsl">   <param name="title" expression="Date Differences"/>   <param name="module" expression="GreetingApp"/> </style>