Cyclic tkCVS page

The tkCVS package is one of the most popular graphical user interfaces for CVS.

Here are some screen shots:

• Main screen (GIF, 17K), showing a list of files. Click on alloca.c and then the log icon at the bottom of the screen, and tkCVS will show the log screen.
• Log screen (GIF, 11K). The bottom of the screen shows the revisions for the file. Click on the revision 1.1 with the left button and 1.2 with the right button to select those two revisions. Then click on Diff to show the diff screen.
• Diff screen (GIF, 26K). The two files are shown side by side with the text which differs highlighted.

Mailing lists and newsgroups

There is a mailing list for discussions concerning tkCVS; to subscribe send a message whose body consists of "subscribe tkcvs-discuss" to majordomo@cyclic.com; if all goes well you should get an automated acknowledgement. Traffic has been almost as high as one message per day in the past but as of Jun 1997, it seems to be more like one message per month. To send mail to the list, send to tkcvs-discuss@cyclic.com.

The newsgroup for tkCVS (and other version control systems) is comp.software.config-mgmt.

Getting tkCVS

The latest version of tkCVS (for unix) is 6.0 and is available from several places (see the links below). Note that tkCVS 6.0a, which you might find floating around, was an alpha test release and is older than 6.0.

tkCVS is free software; here are the details.

There is a packaged version of tkCVS as part of our $40 CD-ROM.

You will need a copy of tcl 7.x and tk 4.x. Some operating systems (linux, anyway), may ship with these. Our tcl page has more on downloading them.

Notes on tkCVS installation/use

NOTE: There is a problem using tkCVS 6.0 with recent versions of CVS and tcl/tk. When importing a module, you may get an error message: 'Cannot use non-numeric string as operand of "&&"'. This does not occur with wish4.1. You can also issue the "cvs import" command from the command line.

Another problem occurs with tcl8: tkCVS 6.0 will tend to crash with "Error: quoted string doesn't terminate properly." The fix is to add a quote to the end of the line mentioned in the error message (tcl8 is less tolerant of this kind of syntax error than earlier versions, we are told).

tkCVS expects to be able to run the command "cvs checkout modules". If your modules file does not contain an entry for modules add a line like "modules CVSROOT modules" to CVSROOT/modules (see the CVS documentation for details).

tkCVS for Windows NT

First of all a disclaimer: this port was not done by the author of tkCVS itself, and he doesn't want to have to deal with it. If you have any questions or concerns, direct them to the tkcvs-discuss mailing list, as mentioned above, or perhaps to the author of the NT port. But not to the author of tkCVS.

Here is version 6.0-NT. Start by unpacking it (if you need help see our unpacking page), and looking at the file README.NT in the distribution, which should describe what else you need and where to get it.

That is a complete distribution--if you just want to run tkCVS you don't need the following, but in case you were wondering how 6.0-NT differs from 6.0, there is a file of patches and a description of the patches.

For more information

The document Version Control with tkCVS by Gerald Brandt is a very nice introduction to tkCVS aimed at users with no CVS experience. Some of the material covers usage specific to the author's site, but most of it applies to tkCVS installations in general.

Download tkCVS from the Neosoft Tcl Contributed Sources Archive (disclaimer: this isn't a Cyclic site, it may have moved, and so on).

The book A Practical Guide to Linux contains a page introducing tkCVS (page 576). Because it is only one page, I doubt you'd want to get the book only for the tkCVS content, but if you already have the book, it is worth a glance as it points to those aspects of the tkCVS user interface which are less self-explanatory than others.

Development of tkCVS

There is a temporary, unofficial development version of tkCVS available from Dorothy Robinson's page. It includes changes to show tags in the log browser, be more foolproof for inexperienced users, and more. See the README file at that site for more information.