CVS at Mozilla.org and Netscape

Nobody knows the problems of managing such a large project better than Lloyd Tabb, who oversees the Mozilla project's engineering processes, maintains its source tree and creates tools that extend CVS' usefulness. "There are hundreds of developers with check-in and check-out privileges involved in the Mozilla project," he said. "And mozilla.org needs an industrial-strength version control system to manage their processes.

"We've found that CVS scales really well, and its openness has allowed us to easily build a bunch of custom tools on top of it, mostly in Perl, Tcl and SQL."

Tabb pointed out that Netscape has been using CVS as its version-control system since before Navigator 1.0 was released. "All of Netscape's source has been under CVS since the beginning, until recently in a single, monster CVS repository. This allows teams to work together and share code, even if their members are geographically distant and have low-bandwidth connections."

For More Information

Mozilla.org page on source management.

Technetcast 1998-05-29 from Dr. Dobb's Journal is a nice introductory interview with Lloyd Tabb about Mozilla's use of CVS (and the related tools Bonsai and Tinderbox).

They have a page describing the hardware they use for CVS. The short summary: 2G RAM, 80G disk, 100Mbps network connection, fast SPARC processor. But then again, they have something like 1000 developers. Your project probably won't need this much hardware!

Mozilla is now using autoconf. See our autoconf page for more on autoconf.

There are too many pages concerning various aspects of Mozilla to list them all, but a few starting places are Mozilla's Dominion (a nice directory of Mozilla sites) and MozillaZine (the best page we've found for late-breaking news). These pages are mostly not about CVS, but they tend to mention CVS in passing from time to time.