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CVSSearch A Search Engine for Code

Introduction

CVSSearch searches for code fragments using CVS comments. Specifically, it takes advantage of the fact that a CVS comment describes the lines of code involved in the commit and that this description will typically hold for many future versions.

The CVS comment history greatly aids understanding what the code does - including its motivation and history. So CVSSearch offers a better search than just looking at the most recent version of the code can.

CVSSearch is a CGI application, so you can easily make its powerful features available within your organisation, or across the internet.

News

CVSSearch is really a dormant project at this point. The original developers have moved on. I (Olly Betts) updated it to work with more recent versions of tools and libraries, and fixed some security issues, but I no longer use CVS and have been too busy with other projects to update CVSSearch to work with other version control systems.

If you're seriously interested in taking over the project, feel free to get in touch. My feelings from having worked with the code are that it would probably be best to use the existing code as a working prototype and rearchitect it. I'm happy to discuss if you want more of my thoughts.

Source Code

You can get the code from SVN:
svn co svn://svn.xapian.org/xapian/branches/1.0/xapian-applications/cvssearch cvssearch

Please read the installation and usage instructions in the README.

Demonstration

Papers

Sample Queries

Try these conventional queries on various applications:

Also, some queries that you would not typically do using grep on code but that now become possible:

Contact

Please send all bugs/comments to Olly Betts.