CVS
p. I’ve just started footling about with [“CVS”:http://www.cvshome.org/], so I was very interested in “this article”:http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976 by Joey Hess about storing his whole home directory in CVS. I don’t think that going to those kinds of extremes would help me a great deal—partly because I have to write a lot of documents in binary formats, so I wouldn’t get the benefits of diff and so forth. In fact, I’m a bit hazy on whether CVS can deal with binary format files at all. No doubt someone will enlighten me…
p. Nevertheless, it’s quite inspiring, and I can see that the benefits would be enormous. I’ve often had the experience of binning some document, only to find (amid much grinding of teeth and tearing of hair) that I needed it a few weeks later, and I have a lot of trouble keeping track of all the numerous revisions of co-authored papers. It would be fantastic to be able to see the differences between the current version and the one three revisions back in a clearer and more reliable way than Word allows—not to mention the hideous privacy problems involved with revision tracking in Word. I certainly want to start using CVS consistently with my web sites, so that when I break something disastrously while tinkering (and I do mean ‘when’ rather than ‘if’), I can roll back to the last good version fairly easily. I’ve got to do some serious studying of “this article(CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects)”:http://www.durak.org/cvswebsites/ to work out the best way of doing it.
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CVS can deal with binary, but only in the sense it won't break it, and even then only if you tell it which extensions are binary files. There's a config file in CVSROOT somewhere to do that.
I start looking at CVS every now and then for website publishing, but one of the things I want to be able to do (completely automatic nightly import of sites) doesn't seem to be possible if new files will be appearing. It never quite works how I want, or the network stuff is fiddly, or it's insecure (depending on which route you take).
Obviously you need to convince the rest of the world that LaTeX was the Right Thing all along...----- I would suggest buying a copy of Pragmatic Version Control, which is cheap and comes as a downloadable pdf file.
I've been using CVS for a while but they certainly explain it well and it comes with a nice cookbook where you can look things up when you've forgotten something.
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/starter_kit/vc/index.html
by Richard Chamberlain @ 19/11/2003 9:11 am • Permalink •
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You might want to look at subversion; It handles binaries and supports move, rename, mkdir etc which the old CVS just can not do. It's still pre-version-1.0 but it's getting there.
My unix homedir have been "subverted", so it's only an export away. I think subversion is one of the first things I'm going to install on my Powerbook G4 15", when it finaly arrives this week. ;>
http://subversion.tigris.org http://svnbook.red-bean.com
by g.m.l.klok @ 30/11/2003 7:11 pm • Permalink •
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