Essential CVS

Strategies and Practices

CVS is a tool that can help you manage a project, but you need to decide how to use CVS with your project to make it work effectively for you and your team. The following sections present some ideas to help you integrate CVS into your working practices.

Tag and Branch Strategies

Decide whether and how you will use tags and branches, and then decide on the format to use for tag and branch names. Branching philosophies, styles, and policies are explained in Section 4.4 section of Chapter 4.

I strongly recommend keeping almost-complete work separate from experimental work. In programming projects, I recommend keeping bug fixes separated from the main body of development by putting either bug corrections or development on a branch.

If you use branches, designate an owner for each branch. The owner should be responsible for seeing that the branch is used for its specified purpose, for maintaining a record of the changes made to that branch, and for managing merges to or from that branch.

I strongly recommend tagging at strategic points in development, at the root of each branch, and at each merge point. See Section 4.1.6 of Chapter 4 for more suggestions for tagging.

Automation Strategies

Automation can be helpful in ensuring that a project moves smoothly to completion. Generally, automation translates into consistency. When using CVS on a project, you may find the following automation strategies to be helpful:

• Use the scripting files in CVSROOT to enforce project ...