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.
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:
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.
admin
command
admin
command can cause
CVS to cease working. See section A.6 admin--Administration front end for rcs, before trying
to use it.
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 The FAQ is no longer maintained, however, and this manual is about the closest thing there is to a successor (with respect to documenting how to use CVS, at least).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.
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.
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 http://www.signum.se/ Cyclic Software United States of America http://www.cyclic.com/ info@cyclic.com
http://www.cyclic.com particularly the Unsupported Resources page http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs-index.htmlIf you are so inspired, increasing the information available on the net is likely to be appreciated. For example, before the standard CVS distribution worked on Windows 95, there was a web page with some explanation and patches for running CVS on Windows 95, and various people helped out by mentioning this page on mailing lists or newsgroups when the subject came up.
bug-cvs
.
Note that someone may or may not want to do anything
with your bug report--if you need a solution consider
one of the options mentioned above. People probably do
want to hear about bugs which are particularly severe
in consequences and/or easy to fix, however. You can
also increase your odds by being as clear as possible
about the exact nature of the bug and any other
relevant information. The way to report bugs is to
send email to bug-cvs@prep.ai.mit.edu
. Note
that submissions to bug-cvs
may be distributed
under the terms of the GNU Public License, so if
you don't like this, don't submit them. There is
usually no justification for sending mail directly to
one of the CVS maintainers rather than to
bug-cvs
; those maintainers who want to hear
about such bug reports read bug-cvs
. Also note
that sending a bug report to other mailing lists or
newsgroups is not a substitute for sending it to
bug-cvs
. It is fine to discuss CVS bugs on
whatever forum you prefer, but there are not
necessarily any maintainers reading bug reports sent
anywhere except bug-cvs
.
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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