Linux in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Chapter 14. CVS and RCS

CVS, and the older RCS, offer version control (or revision control), the practice of maintaining information about a project’s evolution so that prior versions may be retrieved, changes tracked, and, most importantly, the efforts of a team of developers coordinated.

Basic Concepts

RCS (Revision Control System) works within a single directory. To accommodate large projects using a hierarchy of several directories, CVS creates two new concepts called the repository and the sandbox.

The repository (also called an archive) is the centralized storage area, managed by the version control system and the repository administrator, which stores the projects’ files. The repository contains information required to reconstruct historical versions of the files in a project. An administrator sets up and controls the repository using the procedures and commands later in Section 14.3.

A sandbox (also called a working directory) contains copies of versions of files from the repository. New development occurs in sandboxes, and any number of sandboxes may be created from a single repository. The sandboxes are independent of one another and may contain files from different stages of the development of the same project. Users set up and control sandboxes using the procedures and commands found in Section 14.4, later in this chapter.

In a typical interaction with the version control system, a developer checks out the most current code from the repository, makes changes, ...