GCC revision history in CVSQL

[Ben Elliston <bje at redhat dot com>]

I recently released a little package called CVSQL that, as its name
implies, keeps CVS revision metadata in a database to be used as a
discovery tool by users, by regression testing tools, or whatnot.
Yesterday I imported all of the gcc.gnu.org revision history since day
one into the database.

The database associates collections of patches into "changesets" so
that patches can be meaningfully and completely extracted and, for
regression testing, backed out.  The definition of a collection is
"all revisions committed atomically by the user".  When changes are
commited, CVSQL also discovers PR numbers and patch author email
addresses in the commit messages and records those explicitly.

As you know, CVS operates on files and if you want to ask more complex
questions, CVS employs recursion over the tree.  With this data in an
auxillary SQL database, more expressive queries about the entire tree
can be asked, and answered more quickly.

At present there is no externally available SQL database for this
purpose, so I am using an internal database at Red Hat.  Here is a
static page I prepared earlier :-) that shows commits over the last 24
hours, just to give folks a feel for what it looks like:

        http://people.redhat.com/bje/cvsql/recent.html

Ben