Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
go ahead... be a heretic
 
PerlMonks  

Re: Learning How to Use CVS for Personal Perl Coding Practices

by tphyahoo (Vicar)
on Nov 03, 2005 at 09:50 UTC ( [id://505267]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Learning How to Use CVS for Personal Perl Coding Practices

First of all, learn subversion first: it's the future. Cvs is pretty similar and you can always learn it later.

Next, if you're on windows, first thing to do is download tortoisesvn gui shell for it. To heck with the command line, the gui makes everything sooo much easier. Also, if you download tortoise, that takes care of everything, you don't need to download subversion client or server or anything, it's all bundled in tortoise. Not sure if tortoisesvn is ok for unix, but if it's not, I would suggest hunting around for some gui shell that is.

Make a test repository, and dink around with it for a while, following the "easy start for beginners" type stuff in the manual. Use the tortoisesvn manual, not the subversion book: the tortoisesvn manual is a lot easier and will get you productive sooner. You can always read the subversion book later for the nitty gritty.

For the more fancy stuff (both subversion and cvs), pay a visit to cvsdude's forum, or the svn or tortoisesvn mailing lists. Personally I like cvsdude's better, but maybe that's just cause I find web forums easier to navigate than mailing lists.

Finally, USE it. It will save you time, and the time saving will probably kick in pretty fast. Don't just use it for code. Use it for letters, notes to yourself, excel spreadsheets, whatever. Version control is a very Good Thing. Good for you for deciding to learn about it and integrate it into your set of tools.

  • Comment on Re: Learning How to Use CVS for Personal Perl Coding Practices

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Learning How to Use CVS for Personal Perl Coding Practices
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Nov 03, 2005 at 16:18 UTC

    I think the biggest selling point of any SCCS is what you might do with it in the future. Considering I have an account on SourceForge, and that they use CVS, using CVS for my personal perl projects makes sense as I'll be able to leverage all my experience using cvs with SourceForge with what I'm doing outside of SourceForge; I'll be able to create a project on SourceForge and move my repository over; and if/when I do so, I won't need to change anything that I'm doing in order to use it.

    I know there are a number of open-source SCCS repositories found on the 'net now. But I would suggest that using what they use (whichever one of "they" that you choose) will make life easier should you ever want to put your project up there to collaborate with others.

    Update: This isn't an argument against Subversion. Just a warning to educate yourself on what you may want to do in the future before committing to something now ;-) (It isn't even meant to be an advertisement for sourceforge ;-})

      Just to note, one of the design goals of Subversion was that the command interface be backwards-compatible with CVS. So if you switch over, you won't need to relearn how to use your SCM, just remember to type 'svn' instead of 'cvs' (or alias cvs=svn in a shell startup file). The only thing you need to get used to is that you are now able to rename and move directories, as well as do a bunch of other stuff :-).


      Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan
      There's buzz that sourceforge is eventually going to offer subversion support. I sure hope so.
Re^2: Learning How to Use CVS for Personal Perl Coding Practices
by Perl Mouse (Chaplain) on Nov 03, 2005 at 10:37 UTC
    First of all, learn subversion first: it's the future.
    Whenever I hear someone say "Use XXX, it's the future", I think "there's a quack selling vaporware as snake oil".

    Usually, when I look at using a piece of software, I have a problem I need to solve now - I don't need something that will solve my problems at some unspecific time in the future.

    If you want to pitch subversion, sell it on its merits. "It's the future" is meaningless.

    Perl --((8:>*
      All right, all right. <grumbles>

      "So what's wrong with CVS? Because it uses the RCS storage system under the hood, CVS can only track file contents, not tree structures. As a result, the user has no way to copy, move or rename items without losing history. Tree rearrangements are always ugly server-side tweaks......

      ......

      In 1995, Karl Fogel and Jim Blandy founded Cyclic Software, a company for commercially supporting and improving CVS. Cyclic made the first public release of a network-enabled CVS (contributed by Cygnus software). In 1999, Karl Fogel published a book about CVS and the open-source development model it enables (cvsbook.red-bean.com). Karl and Jim had long talked about writing a replacement for CVS; Jim even had drafted a new, theoretical repository design. Finally, in February 2000, Brian Behlendorf of Collabnet (www.collab.net) offered Karl a full-time job to write a CVS replacement. Karl gathered a team and work began in May.

      The team settled on a few simple goals: it was decided that Subversion would be designed as a functional replacement for CVS. It would do everything that CVS does, preserving the same development model while fixing the flaws in CVS's (lack of) design. Existing CVS users would be the target audience; any CVS user should be able to start using Subversion with little effort."

      As always, your milage may vary. But that's what I meant about "future."

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://505267]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others chanting in the Monastery: (6)
As of 2024-03-29 15:18 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found