Development of CVS: documentation

This page contains contributed documentation for CVS. Additional documents can be found on our CVS Information page and any number of other places (that page has some good starting places).

Note that these materials may be in an unpolished state. Copying terms may also vary.

CVS Training Exercises

Here are some exercises designed for use after students have completed a one or two day CVS class. The exercises are designed to be done in groups of 3 students. The file printed/exercises.ps contains the exercises; the file printed/cvs-ref.ps is a CVS reference card. The rest of the files are the sample files to be used in the exercises. Note that this is not a highly polished product; for example you'll need to look through the exercises to figure out where to put the sample files. Download the exercises (gzipped tar archive, 93K).

Advanced Exercises

Here are some exercises designed for use after CVS administrators have completed a class on manipulating the CVS repository directly (with RCS and normal file manipulation commands). One probably "shouldn't" have to deal with CVS on this level, but somehow it always seems like there is some little case which turns out to be easier that way. As with the previous exercises, these exercises are not a highly polished product. Download the exercises (gzipped tar archive, 81K).

Cederqvist

This section contains ideas for modifications to the Cederqvist.

• The "Compatibility" node in cvs.texinfo is getting unwieldy. I think it wants to be broken down into "upgrading from 1.3 to 1.5" and "upgrading from 1.5 to 1.9" or some such. It also probably wants to include some of the more interesting bits of NEWS. At least for the more recent changes. For older ones, probably less point in including bits of NEWS.
• Reorganizations:

    Builds wants to be under Revision management, as does a section on
      interfacing to bug-tracking systems.
    The following want to be under Overview:
      Recursive Behavior
      Overall structure of CVS commands
      CVS's exit status
      Default options and the ~/.cvsrc file (?)
      Global options (??)
      Common command options (?)
  
    Quick reference (Invoking CVS) also wants to include:
      administrative files (?)
  

• "cvs tag -r" doesn't seem to be documented (Invoking CVS has it, but points to a node which doesn't mention -r). Furthermore, it is rarely what people want, as it operates only on files which happen to exist in the working directory at the time you run the command. This might be bogus behavior (and might be worth documenting as not something to rely on) but it would be worthwhile to recommend rtag instead for most (all?) -r cases. Here is a patch to deprecate "cvs tag -r".
• Does the $Name keyword apply to branch tags? The testsuite only tests non-branch tags and I saw one report that branch tags didn't work. General sentiment seems to be it shouldn't apply to branch tags (because they routinely move), but this should be in Cederqvist and sanity.sh.

Online help (cvs command line client)

"cvs -H admin" doesn't list the options.

Not completely sure what document

Somewhere should talk about portability of repository format between operating systems ("Repository Storage" in Cederqvist?). The repository format is intended to be platform-independent. The status quo is that this is true of ,v files and should be true of fileattr - see binary mode in fileattr.c. However, there is one bug/oversight - the checked out files in CVSROOT are in the platform-specific text file format, not a platform-independent format.