How to find differences between 2 CVS branches?

Question

Is there a command in CVS that can list the differences between 2 branches. By differences I mean a list of files that are different or present in one branch and not the other. If so could you please provider an example?

Answer 1

Needed to do something quick and with very limited knowledge of CVS and GIT and having to deal with a repo that contains hundred of projects, did a kludge like the following:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/path/to/cvsrep
cvs login
cvs export -r HEAD project-name
cvs export -r Branch project-name

Once I had both branches exported, used BeyondCompare to compare the 2 folders. That seems to be give me what I need.

Answer 2

In all honesty, the CVS project hasn't seen an update in 15 years. So, investing time in learning to use it is probably a bad idea.

I'd forget about wrangling with CVS directly; instead I'd import the CVS repo into git, git cvsimport -d CVSROOT.

Once you have that git repository,

git diff branch1 branch2

will work just beautifully.

So, all in all,

git cvsimport -C baz-module -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs/reallyoldsoftware foo/bar/baz-module
cd baz-module
git diff branch1 branch2