Emacs/CVS interface pcl-cvs

The pcl-cvs package interfaces the Emacs editor/environment to CVS.

Mailing lists and newsgroups

The newsgroup for CVS (and other version control systems) is comp.software.config-mgmt. The newsgroups for Emacs are comp.emacs.*. Either place would be a plausible place to discuss pcl-cvs.

There is a mailing list for pcl-cvs; to subscribe send a message whose body consists of "subscribe pcl-cvs" to majordomo@cyclic.com; if all goes well you should get an automated acknowledgement. Traffic has been one message a month or less.

Getting pcl-cvs

Version 1.05 of pcl-cvs is included in the CVS source distribution for CVS 1.10 or older, in the tools/pcl-cvs directory. However, we suggest instead pcl-cvs 2.x from ftp.weird.com, or the XEmacs version of pcl-cvs, both of which are more recent. Newer versions of CVS do not include pcl-cvs.

For more information

The pcl-cvs package contains some documentation.

Development of pcl-cvs

Regarding pcl-cvs on Windows, here is an unofficial patch, and some suggestions from Michael Schmitz.

This unofficial and untested patch removes the feature of pcl-cvs 1.05 whereby it can semi-automatically send email to a bug-reporting address. The people at the receiving end of these reports have shown little interest in them, as far as I know. The XEmacs and ftp.weird.com versions of CVS both already have a similar change.

There is a version of pcl-cvs available from the XEmacs folks. Despite the fact that we might call it "XEmacs pcl-cvs", as far as we know it will run on either XEmacs or GNU Emacs. See ftp.xemacs.org for downloadable versions or browse the development sources via cvsweb. People are working on keeping the XEmacs and ftp.weird.com versions in sync; they should be relatively similar.

There is a beta of pcl-cvs 2.x at ftp.weird.com.

Stefan Monnier has another pcl-cvs with new features.

Development of VC

VC and pcl-cvs are separate packages, both of which help you use CVS from within emacs. VC provides access to a more limited set of CVS features than pcl-cvs does. We don't yet have a separate page for VC.

The version of VC distributed with XEmacs 20.3 and later is said to be significantly improved from the version in previous versions of Emacs.

If you want to turn off the colors in the output from C-x v g, put this in your .emacs (tested with GNU Emacs 20.2). Presumably it would be useful to make this settable with M-x customize in future versions of VC, but this patch doesn't do that.

Light CVS

Yet another emacs interface is Light CVS. See the pages from Pascal Molli or the author.

Obsolete patches

Here is an unofficial patch to work around absolute pathname bugs in CVS 1.9.18 (or so) through 1.9.26. Upgrading to CVS 1.10 or later is probably a better solution.