Concurrent Versions System (CVS)

The following links are from the TheCVSBook.

Home page

http://www.cvshome.org

Download and Install

To download and install from source, see http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Getting_And_Building_CVS_Under_Unix

Your distribution probably has packages available. For example, under Debian, run 'apt-get install cvs'

Create a repository

Once you have the CVS server and client installed, you will need to initialize a new repository. See http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Starting_A_Repository

Add stuff to repository

Once the repository is created, it will have nothing in it. To import existing files and directories, or start adding things, see: http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Repository_Structure

Personal configuration

For an example of how to tweak your personal CVS settings, look at this example cvsrc file that somebody contributed to this site.

See also:

the CVSMailingList

CVSZilla: CVS meets Bugzilla

CVSMerging

CVSReleaseManagement

Share the wealth by SendingPatches

Mac OSX CVS overview: http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/cvsoverview.html

CVS graphical user interfaces: http://cvsgui.sourceforge.net

Tortoise, another CVS gui: http://www.tortoisecvs.org/

Storing your entire /home directory in CVS: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976

The basic steps to switch a directory to CVS control

Here are the basic CVS commands required to switch a directory to CVS based revision control:

cd projname
cvs -d /var/cvs init
export CVSROOT=/var/cvs
cvs import -m "initial import by Bob" projname bob start
cd ..
mv projname projname.pre-cvs 
cvs co projname