GUI-tools

File revision history is probably best viewed graphically by bk revtool.

Upon startup, the bottom window displays the last month's revision history for the file or project.

To view the comments for just one revision, left click once on that revision in the graph.

To see the differences between two revisions, left click the older revision and right click on the newer revision. The differences will be displayed in the lower text window. Right click on another revision to diff with another revision. The default diff format is -u (unified diffs).

To see the contents of a file, double click the left mouse button on the revision node in the graph. The text shown for the file is annotated with the user name and the latest revision that modified the line.

Once the annotated file listing is shown, you can then click on the text to view the checkin comments associated with the chosen line. Double clicking on an annotated line brings up csettool and shows all of the other files that were modified in the same changeset as the selected line.

To get a side-by-side view of the differences, select the two revisions and click on the "Diff tool" button.

Command Line Interface

BitKeeper has commands that will do the equivalent of bk revtool described above. The information must be extracted by various bk commands, as follows:

To get a list of revisions of a file with revision comments:

bk sccslog file

The above could also be done with:

bk prs file

prs is a superset of sccslog, and used with options, is a powerful reporting tool for scripting. For more information on prs and scripting reports, see Reporting with Scripting.

To display a line-by-line listing of a file showing who modified each line and in what version number of the file it was modified, use:

bk annotate file

There are useful options to bk annotate to give more detailed information in the annotations including prefixing each line with the date it was modified, line number, and filename. Please see Command Summary for details.

To restrict the set of lines displayed to those lines added in a specified revision or date range use:

bk sccscat -rrev

or

bk sccscat -cdate

In this case, the whole file is not displayed, instead, only the lines which were added in that range of changes are displayed.

To display all lines in all versions of a file use:

bk sccscat file

This is useful for determining when a particular feature was added.