Summary of CVS changes since CVS 1.3

CVS is a well-known package, particularly in the unix world, but there have been a number of significant enhancements which have seen widespread distribution only in the last year or so, and which people may or may not be aware of. This is a summary of those enhancements; for more details see the NEWS file in the CVS distribution. In most cases the enhancements listed are in the CVS 1.8 release, but if you are making decisions based on their availability or bug-free-ness we recommend taking a closer look (there are a variety of places one might seek this information; of course we are biased--a support contract from Cyclic includes having us advise you about versions which contain particular features and fix any problems which may come up).

• The so-called "death support" features allow a file to exist on some, but not all branches, allow one to re-add a file which had been previously removed, and other such operations. The existence or non-existence of a file is a fact which is itself version controlled, so that one may re-create the state of a previous release. Some version control systems refer to this feature as being able to version control a directory.
• A client/server CVS. What distinguishes this client/server protocol from many other client/server version control systems is that it works well over a wide area network. One can also check out sources and then disconnect from the network entirely, only needing to reconnect when one wants to check in files, access version history, or perform other operations which interact with the repository.
• The "cvs annotate" command prints each line of a file along with the version number which made the most recent modification to that line. This is a commonly requested feature that SCCS and other systems have.
• Many bugs have been fixed. Of course the particular bug which is annoying you may or may not have been fixed; as with all CVS enhancements, fixing bugs depends on customer and/or volunteer interest.
• There have been a number of performance improvements. As with bugfixes, your mileage may vary, so the specific operation whose speed concerns you may or may not have been sped up.
• There is now a set of optional "watch" features which provide a hybrid model between reserved and unreserved checkouts. Using these features it is possible to find out who is editing which files, but concurrent edits are still possible. The ability to use unreserved checkouts, or to hack up reserved checkouts (not, yet at least, nicely integrated into CVS, but satisfactory for some people), is unchanged.
• The CVS client has been ported to VMS, Windows NT, and OS/2 and the non-client/server CVS has been ported to Windows NT. People have gotten ports running on Windows 95 and the Macintosh, but these two ports have not been incorporated into the main CVS sources and presumably need some work in terms of cleanups and bugfixes. The progress and continued maintenance of these and other ports, depends, as usual, on customer and volunteer interest.

Cyclic Software sells support for CVS, the cross-platform, easy to administer client/server configuration management system. For more information on Cyclic and CVS, see our web page at http://www.cyclic.com.