Providing customized source code control with CVS

Once you have an empty repository, you need to do some things to make it useful.

The first command to run is cvs init, which will set up the administrative files CVS needs in the repository.

The next thing to do is normally to load the files you wish CVS to control. There are several ways to do this, depending on what format they are currently in.

If your files are not under source control now, take each directory tree you want to use, get a nice clean copy, and enter
cvs import -m"initial import" module-name vendor-branch-name initial-tag
where module-name is the name of the module, usually the top-level directory name, and vendor-branch-name and initial-tag can be pretty much anything, as they will not be used again.

You can do the same thing by adding the top-level directory to the repository, and doing cvs add to put the directories and files in, but that is more tedious.

If your files are currently under RCS control, you can gather the RCS files (with names ending with ",v") into a directory tree directly under the repository. CVS was originally an outgrowth of RCS and still uses the RCS format.

You may be using a different system, in which case you would either get a clean copy and import your files, losing the previous history information, or find or write a conversion to CVS or RCS. Some of these can be found in the contrib directory of the CVS distribution, such as "pvcs2rcs.in" (for conversion from PVCS), or "sccs2rcs.in" (for conversion from SCCS). If you are converting from VSS, see Jerry Laine's conversion program and notes (or download the zip file).

All contents of these pages Copyright 2002 by David H. Thornley.
Permission granted for verbatim copying and use within an organization.