| An Elephant's Memory |

CVS, or the Concurrent Versions System, is a very powerful tool in the arsenal of any developer or software programmer. It is a system which allows you to keep track of the software code you write, to maintain it in a logical manner, and to easily backtrack to previous versions or releases of the software. By storing your code in a CVS repository, you can easily mark specific points in development, log changes made over time, and extract a snapshot of a specific file as it looked six or eight months in the past.

In addition to keeping track of different software versions, CVS also helps to manage large, distributed software development projects (common to many open-source projects), in which developers located in different geographical locations collaborate to build a piece of software. In such situations, keeping track of changes made by individual developers to the overall body of code is almost impossible, and CVS provides an elegant solution to the problem by allowing each developer to work on copies of the original source and then merging the changes into the main code tree.

Finally, CVS also supports "code branches", which are essentially offshoots of the main code tree, usually initiated to fix bugs in older versions of the code. Since CVS comes with in-built mechanisms for version numbering and tagging, it provides developers with a simple way to spin off sections of the main code tree, yet still keep track of different versions and even merge the code branches back into the tree at a later date.

It should be noted at the outset itself, though, that CVS is merely a mechanism to manage different versions of your code. It does not help you write better code, provide you with deep and meaningful insights on software architecture, or assist you in building you a better thingamajig. The stability of your software code is entirely outside the boundaries of CVS' responsibility.

Think of CVS as an elephant, one with a long memory - if you're a good coder, it'll help you reminisce about the bee-yoo-tiful software you write in your younger days...and if you're a bad one, it'll make it hard for you to forget your mistakes.

If you don't already have CVS installed on your system, you can download it from http://www.cvshome.org/ Installation consists of the usual configure-make-make install cycle, or you could download a pre-compiled binary for your specific platform. The remainder of this tutorial assumes that you have CVS installed and functioning on your system.

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