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CVS Server Administration Tips?
Twintop asks: "The company I'm working for has asked me to take over administration of their CVS server for a decent sized project. The current setup of the CVS server needs to be wiped clean and started fresh. The only times I've ever used CVS (and used it poorly at that) was with a few SourceForge.net (An OSTG Site) projects. What are some suggestions on reference materials for a newbie to CVS (but not to Linux) and methods of administration that have worked for you in the past?"
The CVS Book is a free download. You can order a dead-tree version, as well.
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this way, any files created/modified within that directory will retain their group writable permissions. you'll need to set the CVS_UMASK variable for each user as such in the shell of the remote machine they'll be using CVS from.
you'll need to set the CVS_RSH variable to ssh, so it tunnels:
and your cvs home will look something like:
to make it even more convient, i suggest you research ssh-agent/ssh-keygen and use keys. no more passwords, with security and group protections
- tristan
If you have an opportunity to, chuck it and use Subversion instead.
One thing to remember is that although subversion may be the new hotness, it's the NEW hotness. By this i mean that while there are certainly bugs and problems in cvs, they are most likely *known* bugs and problems - unless your usage is way out there on the cutting edge, the likelihood that you will discover a brand new never seen before bug in cvs is quite low. Sadly, the same can't be said for svn - not because it has quality issues but because it's a younger product. Whilst it's true that no open source project gets very far without users and bug reports, this is still something to keep in mind when making a "cvs vs svn" decision.
Just my 0.02$
#!/usr/bin/english
BRL-CAD is a very large scale project with over 20 years of history in RCS and CVS. The CVS repository now lives on SourceForge with pretty much the entire revision history preserved (the project only recently released as open source). You can see one of the oldest files, for example here (bool.c). If you look to the end of the file, you'll see something like: Wed Apr 18 02:19:43 1984 UTC (20 years, 9 months ago) by mike
Several years ago, many of the current CVS practices were written down and organized into a rather detailed generic CVS policy. It basically all boils down to being able to guarantee a certain level of functionality, being very careful about naming directories, and coming up with good tag naming conventions. Likewise, depending on how many developers you have and how active development is, more or less control may be required for branches and validation.
Those last two restrictions are mainly due to limitations of CVS -- it does not directly manage directories or maintain history of directory changes, so you're left up to tracking those changes by policy conventions. (It's rather annoying that a CVS checkout does not prune empty directories by default!) If your directory structure is likely to change frequently (e.g. a new large project starting up), then something like SVN may be less painful. that said, BRL-CAD's history has easily endured CVS's inadequacies quite successfully.
Cheers!
Sean
You are the reason people do not like to ask questions. And I am not talking just about /.. You have this superiority complex that if you know the answer, or do not like the question, the person asking it must be stupid. Read the original post again. Did he ASK for you to do his job? No. Did he ask you to teach him to be a guru CVS admin in 21 minutes? No. He admitted that he did not know something but needed to learn quickly. He asked for directions on GOOD places to look for answers.
You are right that there is nothing that beats personal experience. Yet you belittle people for asking to learn from the personal experience of others.
I hate to break this to you, but Google is not always your friend. There is a lot of good information and a lot of garbage there too. One must sort out the garbage from the good. But if you don't know enough about the information, how do you tell the garbage from the good? He could spend weeks trying to sort out the info. Which is the option you want people like him to choose. Just as long as it doesn't take any of your precious time. You may be an expert in the field and know the good from the garbage at a glance. Not everyone is. If you are an expert, you may know which are the best terms to use in the search. Is "CVS Administration" better than "Administering CVS?" Perhaps "Best Practices CVS Administration" is a better search term. But someone not knowing CVS could spend way too much time just trying to refine the search to bring up the needed info, let alone actually learning from the best info.
People like you do a lot to lower the average intelligence of humanity. I hope that you never have children. They would learn to be afraid of asking questions. They would learn that it is better to be ignorant than to try to learn.
If you think that a question is stupid, you have the right to that opinion. However, once you have the reputation of a blowhard, there is little point in talking, since few listen to the wind. I, for one, will not listen to the wind anymore.
Actually, one of the great things about Subversion is that it's pretty much just an incremental upgrade from CVS.
For basic, day-to-day tasks, the only thing you need to switch is the word "cvs" with "svn" on your command line (or switch from TortoiseCVS to TortoiseSVN). "svn co/checkout", "svn up/update", "svn ci/commit" all work just fine.
I've switched over several groups (usually 5-20 developers) and the time to get back to work for each was in the order of half an hour or so (a lot less for some developers).
The biggest comment that I've had from those groups is that "Subversion is a relief". All of a sudden, the things you need to be careful with (renaming files, creating/moving directories, etc) with CVS are no longer issues with SVN.
ViewCVS works with Subversion, plugins exist for Eclipse, NetBeans, Forte and .NET. Command line is highly compatible with CVS. All-in-all it's a pretty easy switch, with lots to gain and not much to lose.