Version Control with CVS

Abstract

Have you ever noticed a particular moment at which a project seems to run out of control? Perhaps it’s when you make “just a couple of changes” and find that you have brought everything crashing down around you (and even worse, you’re not quite sure how to get back to the point of stability you have just destroyed). It could be when you realize that three members of your team have been working on the same set of classes and merrily saving over each other’s work. Or perhaps it’s when you discover that a bug fix you have implemented twice has somehow disappeared from the codebase yet again. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool to help you manage collaborative working, allowing you to take snapshots of your projects and roll them back if necessary, and to merge multiple strands of development? In this chapter, we look at CVS, a tool that does all that and more.