CVS stores your files in a central place called a repository.
The repository is stored on disk, either on your local machine or on a remote
server. This section describes the locally stored version.
Revisions
Every time you make changes to a file that's stored in CVS, a new revision is created.
Basic operations
How does CVS know when a file has changed? Does it create a new revision every time you save a file?
Repositories
To check files in and out, you must first create a repository. For brand new projects, you create new files and add them
to the repository as you go. For existing projects that aren't under version control, you can import the entire project with
a single command.
Editors and CVS
CVS frequently asks you for information by starting an editor with a template in it. You can control which editor CVS invokes,
by setting the EDITOR environment variable.
Creating a repository
First, you must decide where the repository is to reside. For this example, it's $HOME/cvs.
Importing an existing source tree
It's probably easy to see that adding an existing source tree to CVS using the sequence of add and commit commands outlined above is tedious for more than a couple of files. In these cases, we'll use the import command. We'll cover the most basic use of this command in this section. Later on, we'll look at some more advanced things
that you can do with it.
Changing files
When we created foo.c, we didn't put any comments in! We should probably fix that.
More information on files: what changed and why
The revision number is 1.2 instead of 1.1. We now have two separate revisions of foo.c, so now we can see what changed between them and why the changes were made.