You are claiming CVS is the most widely installed and used revision control system in the GNU world. This may be true, but do you have anything to back up your claim?

There isn't a need to add a CVSROOT to your environment variables permanently. It's only need if you either initially checkin a source tree (using "cvs import"), create a repository ("cvs init") or do the first checkout of a project ("cvs checkout"). But for normal day to day actions ("cvs add", "cvs commit", etc), the repository is retrieved from the CVS admin files.

You also say a file cannot be removed from CVS, but I thought that's what "cvs remove" is for.

There is one action that's lacking in the CVS command set. You cannot rename a file other than manually modifying the repository and the admin files. This is troublesome if many developers have checked out the module.

Abigail