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Version Management

with

CVS

for CVS 1.8.5

Per Cederqvist et al

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the section entitled "GNU General Public License" is included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the section entitled "GNU General Public License" and this permission notice may be included in translations approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the original English.

About this manual

Up to this point, one of the weakest parts of CVS has been the documentation. CVS is a complex program. Previous versions of the manual were written in the manual page format, which is not really well suited for such a complex program.

When writing this manual, I had several goals in mind:

No knowledge of RCS should be necessary.
No previous knowledge of revision control software should be necessary. All terms, such as revision numbers, revision trees and merging are explained as they are introduced.
The manual should concentrate on the things CVS users want to do, instead of what the CVS commands can do. The first part of this manual leads you through things you might want to do while doing development, and introduces the relevant CVS commands as they are needed.
Information should be easy to find. In the reference manual in the appendices almost all information about every CVS command is gathered together. There is also an extensive index, and a lot of cross references.

This manual was contributed by Signum Support AB in Sweden. Signum is yet another in the growing list of companies that support free software. You are free to copy both this manual and the CVS program. See section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, for the details. Signum Support offers support contracts and binary distribution for many programs, such as CVS, GNU Emacs, the GNU C compiler and others. Write to us for more information.

Signum Support AB
Box 2044
S-580 02  Linkoping
Sweden

Email: info@signum.se
Phone: +46 (0)13 - 21 46 00
Fax:   +46 (0)13 - 21 47 00

Another company selling support for CVS is Cyclic Software, web: http://www.cyclic.com/, email: info@cyclic.com.

Checklist for the impatient reader

CVS is a complex system. You will need to read the manual to be able to use all of its capabilities. There are dangers that can easily be avoided if you know about them, and this manual tries to warn you about them. This checklist is intended to help you avoid the dangers without reading the entire manual. If you intend to read the entire manual you can skip this table.

Binary files

CVS can handle binary files, but you must have RCS release 5.5 or later and a release of GNU diff that supports the `-a' flag (release 1.15 and later are OK). You must also configure both RCS and CVS to handle binary files when you install them.

Keword substitution can be a source of trouble with binary files. See section Keyword substitution, for solutions.

The admin command

Careless use of the admin command can cause CVS to cease working. See section admin--Administration front end for rcs, before trying to use it.

Credits

Roland Pesch, Cygnus Support <pesch@cygnus.com> wrote the manual pages which were distributed with CVS 1.3. Appendix A and B contain much text that was extracted from them. He also read an early draft of this manual and contributed many ideas and corrections.

The mailing-list info-cvs is sometimes informative. I have included information from postings made by the following persons: David G. Grubbs <dgg@think.com>.

Some text has been extracted from the man pages for RCS.

The CVS FAQ by David G. Grubbs has provided useful material. The FAQ is no longer maintained, however, and this manual about the closest thing there is to a successor (with respect to documenting how to use CVS, at least).

In addition, the following persons have helped by telling me about mistakes I've made: Roxanne Brunskill <rbrunski@datap.ca>, Kathy Dyer <dyer@phoenix.ocf.llnl.gov>, Karl Pingle <pingle@acuson.com>, Thomas A Peterson <tap@src.honeywell.com>, Inge Wallin <ingwa@signum.se>, Dirk Koschuetzki <koschuet@fmi.uni-passau.de> and Michael Brown <brown@wi.extrel.com>.

BUGS

This manual is known to have room for improvement. Here is a list of known deficiencies:

In the examples, the output from CVS is sometimes displayed, sometimes not.
The input that you are supposed to type in the examples should have a different font than the output from the computer.
This manual should be clearer about what file permissions you should set up in the repository, and about setuid/setgid.
Some of the chapters are not yet complete. They are noted by comments in the `cvs.texinfo' file.
This list is not complete. If you notice any error, omission, or something that is unclear, please send mail to bug-cvs@prep.ai.mit.edu.

I hope that you will find this manual useful, despite the above-mentioned shortcomings.


Linkoping, October 1993
Per Cederqvist

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