CVS?

[heeroyuy]

Anyone care to use CVS for our projects? If so I'll set it up, the server we're on has to have another repos setup for some other stuff. No pserver bull, just ssh (naturally, developers will get accounts)

[file cabinet]

I haven't used CVS before.. but I am willing to.

[mgb]

You could use it. I don't know what it is but I am not opposed to it.

hee hee

[Groty]

What kind of CVS are you using? I've messed with a few, but never really felt comfortable with them.

Gotta demo?

[SheepDog]

I've used CVS, RCS, and VSS. I don't really have a preference, but I think it's a really good idea. CVS is perhaps the most widely used, is cross-platform, and doesn't look bad on a resume, so if you want to learn it, I think it's worth your while.

If you want a MS-VSS like experience, you can get WinCVS ( www.wincvs.org ). I'm a command line kinda person myself, so I tend to just use the (very few) commands.

I have a strong preference for pserver, on a separate box that the developers don't have a shell on. This makes it easy for developers to not shoot themselves in the foot by messing around in the CVSROOT directory. I'm the CVS administrator where I work, and I only let a couple other people have shell accounts on the CVS box. Since CVS doesn't really delete things (i.e. moves them to the attic instead), an accidental 'rm' (or similar) command won't mean a loss of work.

I think CVS is pretty easy, is the right price, and is well worth the effort.

[heeroyuy]

Yea, I just didn't know if anyone else felt it would be good for what we do :). I have a personal CVS server a few friends and I use so we can all see each other's code, no strict access permissions enforced except on cvsroot.

I'm uncomfortable with pserver, cleartext passwords _really_ don't make me happy...

[SheepDog]

I'm uncomfortable with pserver, cleartext passwords _really_ don't make me happy...
point taken. This is less of an issue on our secure network behind multiple firewalls ;)

[evil kitten]

cvs?

[evil kitten]

can you tell that I am not technologically literate. How embarassing.

[SheepDog]

cvs?
Software versioning tool (to put it a bit too simply).

[heeroyuy]

To be a true geek and explain it a little less simply :)

CVS stands for Concurrent Version System, it lets you store copies of code or other documents within a central repository. This isn't that incredible, as I could do the same with ftp, it has several other features which make it better.

Anything stored in the repository has to be 'checked out' before it can be editted, this copies it to your local machine, where you edit it and then 'commit' your changes. Multiple people can check out the same file, and when a new version has been committed before you commit yours, it warns you, and will help you integrate them with a conflict resolution system.

Finally, it stores the differences between the original and subsequent copies within the repository, and assembles the newest version when you checkout a file. By doing this, we can order CVS to also retrieve any version of a file, the original, the one Johnny editted 3 weeks ago, the current one, etc. This means that I can view how code or documents were several weeks or days, or hours ago. It also means _nothing_ has to be permenant.

CVS also has other features for programmers that allow us to diversify development into multiple version simultaneously and maintain them both easily (usually), one is called branching, another merging.

Finally whenever someone commits we can have it email us/log it, so everyone developing knows. We can also export this repository for 'releases' of the programs, ie, what you see on intpcentral.

I skimmed over alot of details, but that's a basic explanation.

[/rant]

[SheepDog]

Oh, I can't help myself now that you started this...

Another cool (and very useful) feature is that you can 'tag' multiple files with a common label. This is extremely useful for larger projects that involve multiple source files. So if you have, say, 10 files, but only a couple of them were modified for a partituclar software release, you can use these tags to group the specific revision levels of all the different files, whether they changed or not.

[franzgold]

I really think that you should use Subversion instead of CVS. It was designed to replace CVS and address it's shortcomings, and is relatively easy to learn for those familiar with CVS. I'll be happy to help with any setup and migration needed.