Introduction
Multiple people can work on the same project simultaneously with version control. Team members edit their copies of files, deciding when to share their changes with the rest of the team. Moreover, specific edits can be undone without losing all the work done during development. A source code management system (SCM) is a file management system used to track and manage changes in files over time. There are many SCM applications such as CVS, Git, Perforce, mercurial, and SVN, which may be compared to CVS; we will examine their differences in the following section. So let's get started.
What is CVS?
In 1990 the CVS team developed Concurrent Version System, which is outdated but valuable for a single user. It manages text files individually to copy them into your windows and track when they were made and changed. CVS can also handle binary files, but some functionality will be lost because it cannot perform the same operations with text files.
CVS is open source and works on Windows and UNIX. It is a Client-Server architecture with centralized version control.
There are two essential elements in CVS:
- Source code is maintained centrally in a central repository.
- Multiple people can work on one project with version control.
Features of CVS
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Real-time Collaboration: Several developers can work on the same document simultaneously without conflicting with each other, allowing real-time collaboration and increasing the pace of development of the project.
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Source File History: We often have more than one developer working on a particular file, so when we try to merge all those files to arrive at the final code, we need to see who has committed what changes and what we want to do. It has a concept of a head that stores the current timestamp of the file and stores all the changes that have been made to the file.
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Owned Branches: A developer will have a branch on the local repository for every project. When two people want to make changes to a file, the other person does not wish to do so. There will be no changes to the root file, but a branch will be created for these changes.
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Flexible Module Database: CVS has an index that lets you map your local files to the global files directory.
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Repository Event Triggers: CVS sends an immediate alert to both developers who are working on the same file simultaneously.
- Checkout Usage Model: The feature is available for all Version Control systems.
Commands for CVS
Here are some commonly used CVS commands:
Commands |
Description |
| cvs checkout | To check the sources for editing. |
| cvs add | To add a new file or directory to the repository. |
| cvs status | To show the status for checked-out files. |
| cvs diff | To compare the versions of working files in the repository. |
| cvs log | To show the history of files. |
| cvs commit | To check the files into the repository. |
| cvs remove | To remove an entry from the repository. |
| cvs update | To sync the changes of the working files into the repository. |
| cvs tag | To label the sources. |
Here are some disadvantages of CVS:
- There is a loophole: if you have a corrupt source code file, you won't be aware of it, or you'll have to check it manually.
- The two developers can make changes in the same file simultaneously since checkout and commit are not atomic.
- Changes are made file-by-file in CVS.
- Source control for distributed projects is not well supported.
- The program aims to handle text files, but it is easy to mess up with managing binary files.
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