Learn CVS

Introduction

This series of exercises introduces you to the cvs versioning tool. It uses the same sample project as provided with the exercises to learn make. These exercises are meant to become acquainted with cvs. As such the instructions closely follow the accompanying presentation, which also contains the cvs commands to be used.

The presentation about cvs does not contain all necessary information, for example about access rights related to usage by different users. All required information can be found in the `Cederquist' manual. At times some searching and browsing through this manual may be required, especially with exercises starting at exercise 8.

If circumstances allow, these exercises should be done in pairs, where the repository created in exercise 1 is shared. The advantages (and problems) of using cvs for cooperation will be more apparent.

Exercises

1. Create a local CVS repository which will be used for this series of exercises. Import the example code to create a new project. Take care to only include the files which are necessary to rebuild (with make) the project from scratch. For example, it is neither necessary nor desirable that object files (with extension .o) are stored in the repository.
2. Check the project out (cvs checkout ...) in an other (new) location in your local filesystem.
3. Make modifications to a (or some) file(s). If you are working in pairs, make sure to make modifications to different as well as same files. Within a file, make sure to modify different as well as same lines. If you are working alone, checkout the project in two different locations in your local filesystem and simulate the working in pairs by making the modifications in the two different checked out versions.
4. Commit the modifications (cvs commit ...). If a conflict occurs which cannot be solved by cvs (which should happen if the previous exercise has been done), repair the file(s) containing the conflicts and commit again.
5. Add the keywords Id and Header to one of the source files. When added to a file which is used as input for some tool (like a compiler), make sure the keywords are added as part of a comment. Commit the changes.
6. Tag the project (cvs tag ...).
7. Export the project in a new directory (cvs export ...). Use the tag added in the previous exercise. Rebuild the project to make sure all sources are included.
8. Checkout with keyword expansion (so the latest tag is visible).
9. Checkout without keyword expansion (so the keyword remains the same and no unnecessary merges will be required).
10. Create a branch. Make modifications to the branch, and join the modifications of the branch to the original branch.
11. Try to join a branch a second time. This is dangerous because modifications will be joined twice. The manual contains instructions how to avoid this, find those instructions, and redo the previous exercises if necessary to allow for joining twice.