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Version Management

with

CVS

for CVS 1.9.10

Per Cederqvist et al

Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Signum Support AB

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:

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. Keyword substitution can be a source of trouble with binary files. See section 16 Keyword substitution, for solutions.
The admin command
Careless use of the admin command can cause CVS to cease working. See section A.6 admin--Administration front end for rcs, before trying to use it.

Credits

Roland Pesch, then of Cygnus Support <roland@wrs.com> wrote the manual pages which were distributed with CVS 1.3. Much of their text was copied into this manual. 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 is 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>.

The list of contributors here is not comprehensive; for a more complete list of who has contributed to this manual see the file `doc/ChangeLog' in the CVS source distribution.

BUGS

Neither CVS nor this manual is perfect, and they probably never will be. If you are having trouble using CVS, or think you have found a bug, there are a number of things you can do about it. Note that if the manual is unclear, that can be considered a bug in the manual, so these problems are often worth doing something about as well as problems with CVS itself.

People often ask if there is a list of known bugs or whether a particular bug is a known one. The file BUGS in the CVS source distribution is one list of known bugs, but it doesn't necessarily try to be comprehensive. Perhaps there will never be a comprehensive, detailed list of known bugs.


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