158 Empirical Research in Software Engineering
an artifact, receives the branch number 1.2.2 but CVS internally stores it as 1.2.0.2.
However, the main issue with branches is that the detection of branch merges is
not supported by CVS. Consequently, CVS does not boast of enough mechanisms
that support tracking of evolution of typically large-sized software systems as well
as their particular products.
Version control data: For each artifact, which is under the repository’s version con-
trol, CVS generates detailed version control data and saves it in a change log or
simply log les. The recorded log information can be easily retrieved by using
the CVS log command. Moreover, we can specify some additional parameters so
as to allow the retriev ...