Essential CVS, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Basic Use of CVS

This chapter provides a thorough discussion of the most critical CVS commands and topics. It is designed for end users who do not have to administrate the repository and who do not have to make changes that affect the entire project.

The commands explained in this chapter include checkout, commit, update, release, add, remove, ls, and status. Other topics explained in this chapter include sandboxes, merging, conflicts, binary and special files, keywords, editing files in CVS, and the CVS command syntax.

This chapter assumes that you have installed CVS, set up a repository, and created a project. Instructions for these tasks are in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 also touches on many of the commands in this chapter, but this chapter provides a full explanation of their uses.

General Information

CVS stores project data in a repository, but you don’t work directly from the repository. As mentioned earlier, you work from a sandbox. A sandbox may be on the same machine as the repository, on a machine on the same local network, or on a machine connected through the Internet or another wide-area network. Figure 3-1 illustrates some of these possibilities.

Figure 3-1. Repository and sandboxes

The sandbox is a directory on a client machine that contains a copy of a project’s files. Sandboxes are usually within a user’s home directory. All of a given project’s files should be underneath ...