How do I revert a big change in CVS?

Question

One of my colleagues has totally messed up the contents of a directory in our main CVS repository. I need to just revert the whole module to the state it was in at the end of l

Answer 1

Actually your initial approach was very close to the solution. The problem is, that joining date-based does not handle removed files and directories correctly. You need to set a tag to the code base you want to join first:

mkdir code_base1 && cd code_base1
cvs co -D "2008-12-30" modulename
cvs tag code_base_2008_12_30

Now do the join tag-based, subtracting all changes between now and 2008-12-30:

cd .. && mkdir code_base2 && cd code_base2
cvs co modulename
cvs update -d -j HEAD -j code_base_2008_12_30  # use -d to resurrect deleted directories

Compare the contents of code_base1 and code_base2. They should be identical except for the CVS meta information. Finally commit the code as it was on 2008-12-30 as new HEAD:

cvs commit -m "Revert all changes this year"

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Note that tagging the code you wish to join like this will not work, because rtag also does not handle removed files and directories correctly, when using -D:

cvs rtag -D "2008-12-30" code_base_2008_12_30 modulename