Notes on CVS

Notes on how to use CVS for the 15-612 Distributed Systems course are available, but the following are findings and supplemental additions to those notes.

We are using CVS for version control and history tracking. Please try not to work out of the project directory!! Instead, check out a local copy of the project using CVS and work from the local copy. Should you have to work out of the project directory, feel free to do so, but remember that the final project files and web pages will be turned in using the project directory. (So don't screw up anything that's in there!! Thank you.) :)

Checking out the project files into your local directory

We strongly encourage that you work on a local copy of the project files. To do so you will need to check out them out from the CVS repository.

cd ~
cvs checkout projects/NYEV

This is sufficient to check out the files from projects/NYEV into your local directory (~/projects/NYEV). This assumes that you have your CVSROOT environment variable set (see below).

To check out the project files into a specific directory (say ~/NYEV), be sure that the directory is created and then use the -d option to specify where you would like the files.

cd ~
mkdir NYEV
cvs checkout -d NYEV projects/NYEV

Using the CVSROOT and CVSEDITOR environment variables

You should have your CVSROOT and CVSEDITOR settings set appropriately. Instructions for setting up CVSROOT are found here, but to set up your favorite editor to be your CVS editor, you must set the CVSEDITOR environment variable in your appropriate login file or at the shell.

As an example, you could place the following lines into your .login:

setenv CVSROOT /afs/cs/academic/class/15612-s98/repository
setenv CVSEDITOR emacs

Removing Directories and Files from a checked out CVS directory

I don't know of any really easy way to remove directories. You should be able to just do 'rm -r', but that doesn't always seem to work.

For files, you MUST use 'cvs remove ' after removing it permanently using 'rm'. This tells CVS that you have removed the file, so that CVS will "place" the file into what is referred to as "the attic". Doing so will allow the file to be recovered in the future, should the need arise.

rm test.java
cvs remove test.java
cvs commit