Analysing multiple CVS modules with StatCVS

This just came up on the StatCVS mailing list and is worth a blog post. Sometimes you want to create a cumulative StatCVS report that summarizes multiple projects. This neat little trick works if they are all from the same repository. Just checkout the root module:

cvs co .

Running StatCVS on that will produce a nice report for all modules.

If you want some, but not all modules from the repository, and are on Unix, then you can create a “virtual” module that contains only symbolic links:

/cvs
   CVSROOT/
   module1/
   module2/
   module3/
   combined_modules/
       module1 -> ../module1/
       module2 -> ../module2/
       module3 -> ../module3/     

Then run a report on combined_modules.

(Thanks to Brian Peterson for the tip.)