Version Control with CVS on Mac OS X

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

Comments

bK

[Per Wigren]

Why don't they use BitKeeper instead? :)

Arsdigita

[Bouncings]

Reminds me of an Philip Greenspun article on the exact same topic. I think Linux Journal ran some ideas on that as well. Not exactly original.

Default version is 1.10

[Channing]

By default, cvs version 1.10 is installed which caused me some problems when connecting from a remote client to a repository on OSX.

It was easy to build the latest version but I hope Apple updates the default soon.

Chang

very interesting

[self assembled struc]

the article makes several references to using BASH and/or SH, yet, by default OS X doesn't include BASH (i had to compile and install it myself, and then figure out netinfo to get to be my default shell).

Re:very interesting

[dborod]

i had to compile and install it myself, and then...

You can grab a bash binary at:

http://www.osxgnu.org/software/Shells/bash/

The package installs nicely and includes directions on how to have it become your default shell.

If I had a sig you'd be done reading it

Re:Project Builder Integration

[fidget42]

The CVS integration is quite nice, althought it isn't obvious how to bring in a legacy CVS program. It is also missing a way to update the entire tree (i.e., 'cvs update -dP'), but I can live with the way it handles CVS. The diff/merge and version tools are also quite nice.

Re:Project Builder Integration

[tb3]

There's a decent article on CocoaDevCentral about setting up CVS and ProjectBuilder.

I managed to get it working without too much trouble. It works pretty much the way you'd expect an IDE to work with SCM.

maccvs works?

[softsign]

Hey Pudge, how'd you get maccvs to work? I tried using it with a fink install of python, but it didn't seem to like that and said it preferred MacPython. Then I tried getting that to work with no luck as well (I didn't exactly try too hard since the idea of keeping two python installs on one machine didn't appeal to me). Any ideas? I don't really feel like messing with a GUI for CVS unless I know it'll work...

Re:maccvs works?

[Clith]

I do commercial Mac software development, and we use MacCVS Pro to great effect. I recommend it highly. It doesn't hurt that it's GPL and has been stable for over a year.

It is interesting to note that the new version of CodeWarrior for MacOS, version 8, comes with a CVS plugin (not mentioned on that page). I haven't had a chance to try it yet, though.

One thing that does bother me about the various incarnations of CVS on the Mac is how poorly they work together. Partly this is because of the different ways in which they work around CVS' inability to deal with MacOS' multi-forked files. For cocoa apps [like iJournal and Fire] this is not much of a problem, because the old NeXT-style Cocoa development environment sticks strictly to simple data files with no resource forks, which works perfectly with all varieties of CVS.

The upshot is that if you are working with files with resource forks using CVS, you'd better make sure everyone agrees which CVS client you are going to use.