Fixing CVS annotate

Yes, some of us work on projects started almost a decade ago and as such we use CVS (yes, CVS has many limitations and yes, git is better – for a nice introduction see Randal Schwarz’s video about git), but migrating is not directly justifiable (it would involve: training IT staff to be able to maintain the repo, rewriting automation code which relies on CVS and training programmers – even though some of these could be postponed given that git contains a CVS bridge). Anyway, the problem which I faced was the following: cvs annotate only displays the first 8 characters of the username, which can be ambiguous if multiple people have similar usernames (which can easily happen if there is a convention like name.surname). Here is my solution to the problem: fetch the log for the file get the user associated whit each version (in the log CVS includes the full usernames). Then fetch the annotated version of the file and use the version to disambiguate the user. Here is some Perl code:

sub processAnnotations {
  my $fileName = shift;
  my ($cmdLine, $pid, %revisions);

  $cmdLine = "cvs -z9 log -N '$fileName'";
  $pid = open F, "$cmdLine |";
  my $rev;
  while () {
    $rev = $1 if (/^revision ([0-9\.]+)$/);
    $revisions{$rev} = $1 if (/^date:.*?author: (.*?);/);
  }
  close F;
  waitpid($pid, 0);

  $cmdLine = "cvs -z9 annotate '$fileName'";
  $pid = open F, "$cmdLine |";
  my @annFileLines;
  while () {
    if (/^(\d[0-9\.]+)(\s+)\(\S+ (.*)/s && exists $revisions{$1}) {
      $_ = "$1$2(" . $revisions{$1} . " $3";
    }
    push @annFileLines, $_;
  }  
  close F; 
  waitpid($pid, 0);    
  
  return join('', @annFileLines);
}

PS. I verified in the CVS source that the output width for the author field is hardcoded:

		    sprintf (buf, "%-12s (%-8.8s ",
			     prvers->version,
			     prvers->author);

Picture taken from Valeriana Solaris' photostream with permission.