Creating a Repository

This is described here for the benefit of anyone wanting to use CVS for their own projects. There is only one catch, to do with group ownership. To control access you should set up a special Unix group, in our case pcs, and make the project team members of it. Log off and on again after making any changes to /etc/group so they have full effect. Then decide on a repository name and network location which everyone can see. Our repository is at /funsrv1/home/dpcs/pcs-master. Set the environment variable CVSROOT permanently to that location, perhaps in your .bashrc:

export CVSROOT=/funsrv1/home/dpcs/pcs-master

Then create the $CVSROOT directory, change its group to your chosen id, say pcs, and (important) set the group sticky bit. You will need suitable permissions for this, of course.

$ mkdir $CVSROOT
$ chgrp pcs $CVSROOT 
$ chmod g+s $CVSROOT

This ensures that all directories later created under $CVSROOT will belong to group pcs and have the group sticky bit set. This is self propagating, once set up properly. Check the permissions, which should be at least drwxrws---, and the group. Now you can initialize the repository with

$ cvs init

This adds a system directory, confusingly called CVSROOT, to $CVSROOT. The final step is to start populating the repository. Assuming you already have a project directory tree with the root directory at ..../mast-pcs which you wish to put under CVS control, you can do

$ cd ..../mast-pcs
$ cvs import -m "Imported Sources" mast-pcs mast-pcs start

This will create a directory tree in $CVSROOT, with a top level directory mast-pcs. The last two arguments to cvs import are cvs tags which you can ignore for now. All the files in the repository tree will be RCS-format files, with ',v' appended to the original file names. All directories and files in the tree should belong to group pcs as above. Note that CVS ignores symbolic links which must be re-created in the working copies if required. If necessary, at this stage only you can prune the tree manually, removing any unwanted directories and files.