Cyclic page for Practical Software Configuration Management

The book Practical Software Configuration Management by Tim Mikkelsen and Suzanne Pherigo, 1997, gets individuals and small teams started with configuration management. The CD-ROM which accompanies the book includes a copy of CVS, including binaries for Windows 95/NT.

Ordering Information

Order this book from Amazon.com (place the order online, pay via credit card or check).

Note that you must give Amazon your email address and by default they will send you advertisements in the future. If you don't want this, after ordering send mail to no-news-a@amazon.com. The first line of your mail should be "unsubscribe" and the email address that you want removed should be on the next line.

Order this book from Fatbrain.com (order via email, paper mail, or web; pay via credit card, check, or wire transfer).

CVS documentation on the book's CD-ROM

The documentation for CVS is on the CD-ROM which comes with the book. Here are a few notes about what is there. For most purposes the manual you want is Version Management with CVS by Per Cederqvist et al; it is about 160 pages long.

The manual is available in several formats:

PostScript

The file cvs/cvs.ps contains the manual for CVS 1.9 (not 1.8 as the book says). The manual is formatted for A4 size paper; if you print it on US letter size paper, typically the page numbers will be cut off. The CD-ROM does not contain a version formatted for US letter size paper, but see the Texinfo files, below.

info

info is the GNU system's format for on-line documentation. The GNU Emacs development environment contains a browser for info files; there is also a stand-alone browser program.

The info files are on the CD-ROM in the cvs/cvs-1.9/cvs-1.9/doc directory. The info files are cvs.info and cvs.info-n (where n is 1 through 6).

Texinfo

The source for the manual is in Texinfo format, from which you can build on-line documentation or a PostScript file for printing. If you are not familiar with texinfo, you probably don't want to try to figure out how to get a set of texinfo tools just to build the manual (especially on non-unix systems), but in case it is helpful the texinfo-format manual is on the CD-ROM, in cvs/cvs-1.9/cvs-1.9/doc/cvs.texinfo.

The book's CD-ROM and long file names

The book's CD-ROM uses the Windows conventions for long file names. Therefore, if you read the CD-ROM on a non-Windows system, many of the files will have names like cvs-pa~1.ps instead of cvs-paper.ps. On such systems, you may find it more convenient to unpack the tar files on the CD-ROM (which do not suffer from this problem), rather than to try to figure out the correspondence between short and long file names.

Clarifications to the installation instructions

The installation instructions printed in the book are the place to start, but here are a few notes to supplement those instructions:

• The directions tell you to edit autoexec.bat. This file may not already exist on Windows 95. Don't panic, just create c:\autoexec.bat and add the indicated text.
• The CD-ROM actually contains two ports of RCS 5.7, one in the rcs directory, and one in cvs/winnt/rcs57nt.zip. We recommend the latter, because when we tried the former it sometimes failed with "could not check out filename" messages.
• The directions for installing CVS refer you to the INSTALL file. Because many parts of that file concern unix or rebuilding from source code, here is a rewritten version of the relevant ports of the file as they apply to Windows 95/NT. Because your CD-ROM already contains executables, there is normally no need to build from source code.
  • Take a look at the CVS documentation. The best source is the Cederqvist manual on the CD-ROM, as described above.

    See what it can do for you, and if it fits your environment (or can possibly be made to fit your environment). If things look good, continue on...

  • Set up the master source repository. See the "Setting up the repository" section of the Cederqvist manual for details; the quick summary is just to pick some directory. We'll use d:\src\master as an example. In this and subsequent examples we use ">" to indicate the command prompt; do not type the ">".

    > cvs -d :local:d:\src\master init

  • Have all users of the CVS system set the CVSROOT environment variable appropriately to reflect the placement of your source repository. Supposing the repository will be in d:\src\master, place the following line in c:\autoexec.bat. On Windows 95, autoexec.bat might not already exist. In that case, just create a new file containing the following line.

    set CVSROOT=:local:d:\src\master

    If the CVSROOT variable is not already set in your current command environment, set it now by typing the above line at the command prompt (or reboot).

    You will need to have the CVSROOT environment variable set to continue on to the next step.

  • It might be a good idea to jump right in and put the CVS source distribution directly under CVS control. Supposing that the CD-ROM is mounted as the e: drive, you would run:

    > e:
> cd \cvs\cvs-1.9\cvs-1.9
> cvs import -m "CVS distribution" ccvs CVS_DIST CVS-TEST

    (Those last three items are, respectively, a repository location, a "vendor tag", and a "release tag". You don't need to understand them yet, but read the section "Starting new projects" in the Cederqvist manual for details).

  • Having done the previous step, one should be able to checkout a fresh copy of the CVS distribution and hack away at the sources with the following command:

    > c:
> cd \joe
> cvs checkout ccvs

    This will make the directory "ccvs" in the directory c:\joe and populate it with the appropriate CVS files and directories.

  • You may wish to customize the various administrative files, in particular modules. See the Cederqvist manual for details.
  • Read the NEWS file to see what's new.
  • Hack away.
• You need to make sure that the system doesn't think that you have an empty login name, or else you may get "missing author" messages and other strange behaviors. Note that setting the USER environment variable does not consistently override the system login name.
• If you do not have a c:\temp directory, RCS will give an error. One solution is to create c:\temp, or if you want RCS to put temporary files in a different directory, set the TMPDIR environment variable to point to that directory.

Errata

The version of CVS supplied is 1.9. Most of the known bugs in 1.9 are relatively obscure (depending, of course, on your definition of obscure).

Page 191 says there are no RCS web pages. In fact, there are many. For example, see Cyclic's own RCS page.

Getting Help

For help using CVS, bug-fixing, and other forms of support, we'd recommend either poking around this website and the resources it links to, or investigating a support contract from Cyclic, depending on your needs. Support contracts are described elsewhere on this website, or ask us for more information.

Bureaucracy

Fatbrain.com requires us to display their logo: