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It obviously won't help with the protocol restrictions but might be useful.

You can find out about CVS at Cyclic's home page. There's also a manual section and a section in the on-line CVS book about vendor branches.

To this day, most usrrs and admins resolve CVS problems by mucking with the /CVSROOT files themselves, and just taking it from scratch. It is incredibly easy to get CVS into a confused state, particularly when removing or moving files.

Um, yeah, and if you happen to think that "rm" stands for "RenaMe", you can also get yourself in trouble. This is kind of a sore subject for me, because a number of people where I work loudly and consistently preach the virtues of supporting user stupidity. "Oh, if they set this environment variable and used this command-line option and delete the temporary file, the button might be an ugly color! Lock it down!"

At some point, you have to stop trying to protect users from their own stupidity. Especially admins, come to think of it. Anyone who ignores the instructions in the manual (freely available btw) shouldn't be administering anything, let alone the version management system for a multiple-developer project.

Face it: system administration can be hard work sometimes. Doing anything right can be hard work sometimes. If you don't know how something works, learn! Most any package comes with something, and there's always mailing lists, IRC channels, and newsgroups...

The FreeBSD project, and many other projects, keeps all their source code available from a CVS server. CVS is a source code control system, and a CVS server can be made available over the Internet. A FreeBSD user can log into a CVS server and download the source code or a patch or whatever is needed for a particular component (including the kernel).

SysAdmin Magazine did an article on FreeBSD and CVS in the September 1999 issue. They also ran an article in June 1999 called 'The Linux Kernel: A Case Study for CVS', which unfortunately is not available online.

A company called Cyclic does commercial support for CVS, and has some information available online.

darren

The FreeBSD project, and many other projects, keeps all their source code available from a CVS server. CVS is a source code control system, and a CVS server can be made available over the Internet. A FreeBSD user can log into a CVS server and download the source code or a patch or whatever is needed for a particular component (including the kernel).

SysAdmin Magazine did an article on FreeBSD and CVS in the September 1999 issue. They also ran an article in June 1999 called 'The Linux Kernel: A Case Study for CVS', which unfortunately is not available online.

A company called Cyclic does commercial support for CVS, and has some information available online.

darren

I don't know SourceGear as well as Cyclic, but was impressed with their showing of AbiWord at the last LinuxWorld in San Jose. (An anecdote: Linus came up and started playing with it while I was in the booth, and seemed quite impressed.) Their commitment to free software is clear, and I have no worries about the future of CVS under them.

This is a good match.

--Tom Geller

P.S. A version of the P.R. letter with a quote from Jim is at http://www.cyclic.com/cvs/letter_cvs.html

tkCVS does a good job for me.

http://www.cyclic.com/tkcvs/

Cyclic Software

First there is of course CVS from http://www.cyclic.com. CVS isn't just for source code you know. It provides all that's needed to do complete web site management between a number of webmasters at once. It keeps a copy of every revision of every file, giving you access to it in case you change something by mistake. Other control systems like Aegis and RCS are equally usable.

There are MS Frontpage Extentions from http://www.rtr.com for Apache. These automate common tasks such as access controls, simple CGI. Frontpage, even thought it is a Microsoft product, isn't that bad of a program. It provides a fairly good UI for WYSIWYG editing of web pages along with a file manager resembling Microsoft Explorer. Frontpage 2000 will also feature a way to directly access your web pages from Microsoft Explorer via Network Neighborhood... which is pretty cool.

There is WebDAV from http://www.webdav.org for Apache. WebDAV is the "standard" extensions for Apache for web site editing. All your favorite programs should be using it in the future including Frontpage 2000, Dreamweaver (unconfirmed.. but hinted at), etc. It is currently supported by IE5's little editor dealy as well as a few simple clients for Unix.

More and more webmasters are having to conceed to using a WYSIWYG editor, as well they should. Web standards today are not exactly the simple tags they used to be. You have CSS, XML, XSL, HTML 4 with their complex box algorithms and silly incompatibilities between web browsers which make WYSIWYG programs very attractive. WYSIWYG editors have their place, don't dismiss them simply because the common-folk use them as well.

Then again, don't abandon source editing altogether, nothing beats a text editor when you need a quick fix :)

--

web-dav (web distributed authoring and versioning) is a good first place to check, i think with the appropriate apache module it supports in-place page locking and editing via msie 5. if your user community is semi literate, you might also look into cvs to manage web development, which is easier and more effective imho. HTH