Using CVS in Glimmer Labs

In Glimmer Labs, we use CVS (the concurrent versioning system) for sharing files in projects. This document is intended to give you a quick introduction to using CVS in Glimmer. There are many other potential references on CVS, most of which you can find with a smart google search (or by starting at ). This document gives you some guidance in

Getting Started

In CVS you need a central CVS repository in which the shared files are stored. For Glimmer Labs, you can find the repository in /home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS. Once you've checked out a project, CVS should remember where the original repository is.

You can check out a project with

cvs -d dir checkout files-or-directories

cvs -d /home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS checkout Test

If you get sick of typing the -d dir, you can add the following line to your .bashrc or type it at the command line:

export CVSROOT=/home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS

Current Glimmer Repository Contents

The Glimmer CVS repository currently contains:

• Test, a directory used for experimenting with CVS.
• Web/Glimmer, the source code for the Glimmer Web site. (Note that the site is generated using Siteweaver and that you should not edit the HTML directly.)
• WebRaveler, the new version of Web Raveler
• Ravel, the deprecated version of Web Raveler
• Papers, for versions of our papers

Working with a Checked Out Project

Once you have checked out a project, you can feel free to modify the files in the project, to add new files, and to make a note of files you'd like to delete. When you've made a working change to the project, you need to insert your changes into the shared repository.

If you've added a new file to the project, you should tell CVS about it with

cvs add file

cvs add samr

If you've noted that a file needs to be removed, you can use

cvs remove file

When you've made all your changes, you can use

cvs commit

If you only want to commit changes to one file, you can use

cvs commit filename

Collaborative Updates

You've made changes to some files in a project. Your colleagues may also have made changes. How do you know? You can ask CVS to tell you about the differences between your files and the committed changes with

cvs diff

cvs update

Warning! When you update a file you've modified and someone else has modified, CVS will try to merge in the differences. However, it doesn't always succeed. If it fails, it leaves some evidence in the file that you must fix before committing your changes.

Adding a New Project

When you want to add a new project to the Glimmer repository (and not just a few files to an existing project), you need to use a special command that's a little more complicated than I'd like. Please add new projects with caution. In many cases, it makes sense to extend an existing project.

First, switch to the directory that contains the project files.

Next, issue the following command

cvs -d cvs-directory import -m comment directory glimmer start

For example, to create the Test project, I used

cvs -d /home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS import -m "For Playing with CVS" Test glimmer start

Creating Your Own Repository

I hope that you'll evetually want to use CVS for something other than just Glimmer laboratories work. In that case, you should probably create your own repository. You can do so with

cvs -d directory init

I believe that by default, cvs gives access to anyone in the Unix group associated with that directory. You can change the group associated with that directory with

chgrp -R group directory

For example, I created the Glimmer CVS directory with

cvs -d /home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS init
chgrp -R glimmer /home/rebelsky/Glimmer/CVS