Notes on CVS

What is this talk of software 'releases'? Klingons do not 'release' software; our software ESCAPES, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!

— Unknown

This is a variety of documentation and notes on using CVS that I've collected over the years. Most of this was originally written as internal documentation here at Stanford and therefore has quite a few references to internal details of our CVS tree (such as our commit logging system, the location of our repository, and some details of our work style). Despite that, though, a few people outside of Stanford have found it useful, so I'm making it available here on an as-is basis. It was last checked against CVS 1.10.8 and therefore may be out of date if you have a considerably newer version of CVS.

Much of this information duplicates the excellent CVS manual but presents the information in a different order. Different people may find one or the other to be more intuitive or approachable.

Overview information:

• Overview of CVS
• Why put a set of files into CVS?
• Basic CVS usage
• Short CVS command summary

More advanced usage:

• Using CVS inside emacs
• Telling CVS to ignore files
• Renaming files and directories in CVS
• CVS revision numbers

Branches, merges, and conflicts:

• Resolving CVS conflicts
• Importing and tracking vendor source
• Tagging and branching

Some additional, possibly useful information:

• tcsh aliases for working with CVS
• Using CVS keywords in file headers

All of the documents listed above may be reproduced, reused, and otherwise copied without any restrictions whatsoever. Comments and corrections are welcome.