Essential CVS

Distributing Files

All project leads need to distribute completed work at various stages of a project. When working with some projects, such as content management of web sites, you need to distribute files frequently with small changes. With others, such as large programming projects, you need to distribute files less often and with larger changes.

checkout and update

One way to distribute files is to use the cvs checkout command to produce a set of files for distribution. Another way is to use the cvs update command on an existing set of files.

The checkout and update commands are designed to produce a sandbox suitable for editing the files being checked out or updated. The commands create administrative files in the sandbox that most project leads don’t want in a public distribution, so you may need to remove the administrative files in the CVS subdirectory from each of the checked-out directories.

There is a benefit to using checkout and update to distribute files. When you use either command on an existing sandbox, CVS sends only the differences between the revisions currently in the sandbox and the revisions requested from the repository. This uses less bandwidth than the export command, which retrieves entire files.

Exporting Files

While cvs checkout creates a sandbox suitable for editing copies of a project’s files, cvs export creates a release of the project’s files that is suitable for publication. This command uses most of the same internal code as cvs checkout ...