cvs environment for use with the NEXTSTEP java porting effort
Maintained by: Bill Bumgarner <bbum@friday.com>
Lots of Assistance: Vince DeMarco
Release Notes #1
This is a bug fix release. The initial release contained a bug in the rcs binaries; they included a hard-coded path to /bin/diff. /bin/diff is the diff distributed with NEXTSTEP. It is incompatible with cvs and rcs. rcs has been recompiled using /usr/local/cvs/bin as the source of the diff binaries.
patch and a new version of cvs have both been included in this release.
To update your existing cvs environment, replace the existing contents of /usr/local/cvs with the contents of the new archive (for this reason, your source repository cannot reside in /usr/local/cvs-- if it does, move it out of the way first!). Once installed, evaluate 'cvsinit' to install the new template files-- this should not adversely alter your existing cvs environment.
The version information contained within this documentation has been changed to reflect the versions now distributed with the package.
Introduction
cvs provides an extremely powerful system for managing revision control across many software projects that may be in active development by multiple developers. There is nothing terribly NEXTSTEP/Java centric about the release; it was thrown together to fulfill the needs of the porting effort. Since no effort has been made to properly support the NEXTSTEP development environment beyond the command line (nib files, etc), the title of this document and the context of the packages release has been tied to Java as a reminder of its incompleteness.
What is included in this package?
The archive includes quad-fat builds of rcs,cvs, and diff-- all software from the GNU archive sites. Because cvs hard-wires some of the paths internally, the contents of the archive must be installed in /usr/local/cvs.
6-wellington % diff -v
diff - GNU diffutils version 2.7
7-wellington % cvs -v
Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.6.85 (client/server)
Copyright (c) 1993-1994 Brian Berliner
Copyright (c) 1993-1994 david d `zoo' zuhn
Copyright (c) 1992, Brian Berliner and Jeff Polk
Copyright (c) 1989-1992, Brian Berliner
CVS may be copied only under the terms of the GNU General Public License,
a copy of which can be found with the CVS distribution kit.
8-wellington % rcs -V
RCS version 5.7
9-wellington % patch -v
Patch version 2.1
The archive includes all of the man pages, info pages, library resources, and binaries installed by the three packages. Also included are postscript cvs documentation files. /usr/local/cvs/bin, /usr/local/cvs/man, and /usr/local/cvs/info should be added to the PATH, MANPATH, and emacs info environment respectively.
The CVS version number listed above does not tell the whole story. The version included in the package was built from the beta development tree released on January 5, 1996.
Setting up a repository
Before you can use cvs, you must create a repository within which cvs will keep track of all project resources. The program cvsinit is provided for this purpose. To use, first set the environment variable CVSROOT to point to the directory within which the cvs repository will be stored. This directory should be empty and should be on a volume with a reasonable amount of free disk space.
For example, for those using zsh, the following lines can be added to ~/.zshenv to make /LocalDeveloper/Repository/cvs the default cvs repository:
CVSROOT=/LocalDeveloper/cvs
export CVSROOT
Once the CVSROOT environment variable is set, execute cvsinit. cvsinit will copy template configuration files from /usr/local/lib/cvs into $(CVSROOT)/CVSROOT/.
How to use cvs
Pascal Molli has an excellent web page summarizing all the various cvs related materials available via the internet. It is an excellent starting place for learning about cvs.
http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs-index.html
Maintenance, Bugs, Support, Etc.
Formally, this package is completely unsupported. It was thrown together to support the NEXTSTEP/OpenStep Java Porting effort. If you have any problems, questions, suggestions, additions, please send them to <bbum@friday.com>. Updates will be sporadically released as bugs are fixed, features are added, and the various software packages are updated.
The latest version of this package can always be found on the ThoughtPort Authority ftp site:
ThoughtPort has been kind enough to provide the space and connectivity that made the creation and distribution of this package possible. If are looking for connectivity or network production services (content and connectivity), visit ThoughtPort's web site for information:
