1   Introduction

2   Branches

CVS have the ability to handle different branches of the same source. You can do this by tagging the files and then check out it with this tag specified. Every change you make to these files will modify only this branch. You can also specify a release tag which can only be checked out and not changed.

3   Releases

Sometimes you want to specify a specific release that will not change.

3.1   rtag

To specify the release tag to the repository you can use the rtag command.

cvs rtag symbolic_tag modules

The symbolic tag is the release tag

3.2   rdiff

To see the difference between two releases you can use rdiff.

4   import

The import command is a very useful thing to use. It requires three arguments: repository, vendortag and releasetag.

4.1   repository

This specifies where the files should be imported to the cvs repository. If you for example specify foo it will be imported to the directory foo in the cvs database.

And if you specify . as the repository argument it will be placed in the root of the cvs database.

4.2   vendortag

This is a tag that specifies a tag to name the imported sources with. If you check out the sources that have this tag you will get the imported files (and maybe some more files with the same import tag). If you have checked them out you can then add more files to this branch or change them.

This tag is the name for the branch tag (e.g. 1.1.1 or what else you have specified with -b x.y.z).

4.3   releasetag

This argument works quite like the vendortag but with the difference that you can not add files or change them later. So you will always get exactly the same data as you have imported (with some extra CVS information of course).

4.4   -b x

This specifies the branch version to be something else than the default 1.1.1. If you specify -b 1.2 then all imported sources will be 1.2.1 for the first import and later if you import again with the same tag 1.2.2 and so on.

4.5   -d rep

You will probably have to specify the location of the repository root.