9. CVS

Easy. Just cd to the directory that should hold the repository (typically /usr/local/cvsroot on a FreeBSD system) and do a cvs init. On my machines I've created a group cvs, which owns the repository. Access rights within the CVS are governed by the filepermissions on the repository. In this case, as root:

cd /usr/local
mkdir cvsroot
cd cvsroot
cvs -d:/usr/local/cvsroot init
chown -R cvs:cvs /usr/local/cvsroot
chmod -R 775 /usr/local/cvsroot

This part I found confusing in the man and info pages. What I want to do is this: I've got a folder controlme (with files and subfolders) located in your home directory on the client machine A and wish to put it under version control on a host B (knox) (where I've created a repository according to the previous section).

The cvs documentation becomes easier to understand once you get their way of thinking.

Using our example. you need to do the following (assuming that user tomster is a member of the group cvs):

cd ~/controlme # yes, you need to go *into* the folder!
cvs -d:ext:tomster@knox:/usr/local/cvsroot import -m "init" controlme 'tomster' 'start'
cd ..
mv controlme controlme-nocvs
cvs -d:ext:tomster@knox:/usr/local/cvsroot co controlme 

So, what did we do? The first cvs command imports everything inside the current directory into the given repository. It logs the message 'init', gives the package the name 'controlme' (which needn't be identical to the folder, but that's the way I do it). It then adds a (mandatory) 'vendortag' which I always set to my username. The last tag is the release tag, which I always set to 'start', since I haven't yet dabbled with the darker alchemy of tagging in CVS ;-)