Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 26 May 2004, Matrix Mole wrote:

> I've seen this a lot lately on places like sourceforge and other open
> source software locations. I can't seem to figure out exactly what it is
> though. I assume that it's some form of development tool, but that's about
> the extent of my understanding. Doing a quick google I found out a tiny
> bit (but cvshome.org seems to be unavailable for me from work, will have
> to check back there later). In the meantime, does anyone have any idea
> what exactly this is?

I know very little about it myself.  But, from
http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_toc.html :

What is CVS?

CVS is a version control system. Using it, you can record the history of
your source files.

For example, bugs sometimes creep in when software is modified, and you
might not detect the bug until a long time after you make the
modification. With CVS, you can easily retrieve old versions to see
exactly which change caused the bug. This can sometimes be a big help.

You could of course save every version of every file you have ever
created. This would however waste an enormous amount of disk space. CVS
stores all the versions of a file in a single file in a clever way that
only stores the differences between versions.

CVS also helps you if you are part of a group of people working on the
same project. It is all too easy to overwrite each others' changes unless
you are extremely careful. Some editors, like GNU Emacs, try to make sure
that the same file is never modified by two people at the same time.
Unfortunately, if someone is using another editor, that safeguard will not
work. CVS solves this problem by insulating the different developers from
each other. Every developer works in his own directory, and CVS merges the
work when each developer is done.

CVS started out as a bunch of shell scripts written by Dick Grune, posted
to the newsgroup comp.sources.unix in the volume 6 release of December,
1986. While no actual code from these shell scripts is present in the
current version of CVS much of the CVS conflict resolution algorithms come
from them.

In April, 1989, Brian Berliner designed and coded CVS. Jeff Polk later
helped Brian with the design of the CVS module and vendor branch support.

You can get CVS in a variety of ways, including free download from the
internet. For more information on downloading CVS and other CVS topics,
see:

http://www.cyclic.com/
http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs-index.html

There is a mailing list, known as info-cvs, devoted to CVS. To subscribe
or unsubscribe write to info-cvs-request AT gnu.org. If you prefer a usenet
group, the right group is comp.software.config-mgmt which is for CVS
discussions (along with other configuration management systems). In the
future, it might be possible to create a comp.software.config-mgmt.cvs,
but probably only if there is sufficient CVS traffic on
comp.software.config-mgmt.

You can also subscribe to the bug-cvs mailing list, described in more
detail in section Dealing with bugs in CVS or this manual. To subscribe
send mail to bug-cvs-request AT gnu.org.