Concurrent Versions System

The Concurrent Versions System is an open source client/server software revision control system, it is sometimes known as the "Concurrent Versioning System and was originally known simply as cmt, although it remains best known by its initials or CVS. The system is a fork of the Revision Control System that adds minimal project management features to that package in addition to client/server capability that allows remote and collaborative use.

Like its predecessor, it is a bit crude and has never exactly represented either the state of the art in configuration management nor been able to compete with commercial offerings in any way, after all both projects began life as simple shell scripts and CVS still to this day requires a bit of manual intervention if used to its full extent. However in the latter half of the 90s it became popular for open source projects as it was free, in the public domain so licensing zealots could change it to whatever license they wanted and after the FreeBSD project modified the package to allow anonymous access that lessened the manual intervention that you needed to do for commits, making it largely automatic for the client user.

For international use is should be noted that CVS does not parse anything but ASCII text and in later versions UTF-8 only, and this is one of the reasons that it has largely been supplanted by more advanced open source projects in the last few years.

OS/2 text editors with CVS support

 * jEdit - Java based editor - CVS-commit syntax highlighting built in

Version

 * 1.11 (2001-07-18)
 * 1.12.13 (2006-08-02)

Articles

 * The Anon CVS Bazaar - Part I by Henry Sobotka (Apr 1999)
 * The Anon CVS Bazaar - Part II by Henry Sobotka (May 1999)
 * A Warped RCS/CVS HowTo by Henry Sobotka (May 1999)

Links

 * Dick Grune's CVS page - Homepage of the original CVS author.
 * Per Cederqvist et al: Version Management with CVS for cvs 1.11.21 (2005)

License

 * Open source originally in the public domain, later forks released under sundry licenses, the OS/2 version uses the GPL v2.

Authors

 * Walter F. Tichy (RCS developer)
 * Dick Grune (Original developer)
 * Brian Berliner (Converted the shell scripts to C code)
 * Andreas Huber (Original OS/2 port)