Re: CVS

[Kevin McKinley <ronin2@bellatlantic.net>]

On Sun, 6 Apr 2003 18:27:53 +0530
Joydeep Bakshi <joy12@vsnl.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> during the debian installation, I have faced some question about CVS.
> what is this *CVS* & why we need this ?

CVS is Concurrent Versions System. It is a tool for keeping track of
different revisions of files. The files can be text files or binary files
like images.

You can import a project into CVS; a project can be a file, a list of files,
or a whole directory tree. The file(s) you import become the "official"
versions.

You check out files to make changes to them, then check them back in with
the changes. CVS assigns version numbers to the files and keeps track of the
changes you've made each time you check files in. You can attach remarks to
a log each time you make changes, so you can tell just what changes you made
between two versions (1.2 and 1.3, for example).

If you're now working on version 1.4, and you decide you liked 1.3 better,
you can retrieve the earlier version.

CVS takes a little time to learn. Coriolis published a book called "Open
Source Development with CVS" a few years ago; the book was released under a
free software license and is packaged in Debian as "cvsbook". You can
install the package and look at it in your web browser. It's well-written
and has a good table of contents, so you can go right to the sections you
need instead of just slogging straight through.

You really should consider learning about CVS. It was originally intended as
a programmer's tool (which is why you got several responses of "if you don't
know about it you don't need it), but it can be used to keep track of
anything that keeps the same name but changes over time -- use your
imagination.

For example, another debian-user who is a sysadmin posted a link to a paper
about maintaining many machines with as little effort as possible. If I'm
not mistaken it included having entire system images in CVS.

Kevin