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 at Stanford University and therefore has quite a few references to internal details of our CVS tree at the time (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 It was last checked against CVS 1.10.8 and therefore may be out of date if you have a considerably newer version of CVS.

I consider this all entirely obsolete at this point, having switched to Git for (nearly) all of my development. But some people still use CVS, and there's no point in deleting this documentation. Don't, however, expect there to ever be updates.

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.