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Essential CVS
book

Essential CVS

by Jennifer Vesperman
June 2003
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
9h 49m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Essential CVS

Chapter 4. Tagging and Branching

One of the most helpful yet underused facilities of CVS is the tag . CVS’s tagging feature allows you to label a revision for later retrieval. This feature also allows you to fork development so that you can work on two or more versions of your project simultaneously. The version that has been forked off is called a branch , and the main line of development is called the trunk .

This chapter explains tags, branches, and how to merge branches and trunks. It also discusses why and when to branch and provides strategies and hints for using branches effectively in your project.

Tagging

CVS allows you to retrieve any checked-in revision of a file. While retrieving revisions of individual files is useful, it’s even more useful to be able to retrieve the compatible set of revisions that make up a complete, functional version of a project, such as all the revisions that become release 1.0 of a program, or that become the first edition of a book.

Tagging is a way of marking a group of file revisions as belonging together. You can’t use the revision numbers for this purpose, because revision 2.3 of one file might belong with revision 2.17 of another. Figure 4-1 shows a group of file revision numbers, with a string denoting which revision numbers belong to the same release.

File revisions that belong together

Figure 4-1. File revisions that belong together

CVS allows you to create a single tag that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004591Catalog PageErrata