[thelist] getting 'changed by' from cvs

[j.d. welch]

ok. here's a more complicated one.  i have a slew of pages that i and 
others have added a line somewhat resembling 'changed 
('$user','$date'); ' to at the end of each content page (in this case, 
every .html file should get one).  the 'changed' function just looks 
for the appropriate values and outputs a nice 'this page changed by 
$user on $date' message.  however, there are lots and lots of pages, 
many people working on them, and not everyone takes the time to change 
the line, or use a consistent format.

however, all the content is kept in cvs, so it's certainly being marked 
with a last modification time and username of the committer in the cvs 
log.  is there any nifty perl-y way to get this info out of cvs without 
the overhead of calling cvs for each page request?  maybe, every time 
someone checks something in, a separate script edits the line in the 
file (say by writing a script that does that, then does the cvs 
commit)? or something more clever?

how do others solve this problem in mostly automatic way?

as an aside, i'm having a hell of a time googling for useful web-devvy 
perl techniques; if nobody has the answer, what are people's oft-used 
resources for asking these questions?  this site is using mod_perl and 
HTML::Mason, two (imo) ill-documented-for-new-users packages.

-jd

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