Re: Personal repositories

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, April 16, 2002 at 11:13:29 (-0500), Buchs, Kevin J. wrote: ]
> Subject: Personal repositories
>
> I am just getting started with CVS, being experienced in RCS.  I got myself
> fairly confused with Repositories and Directories when I tried to create a
> personal repository in my home directory to hold some of the setup files,
> such as .cshrc that I edit frequently.

Good idea (though personally I'd just use SCCS or RCS directly for such
a few files -- and indeed I have been using SCCS for these kinds of
files for many years now!  ;-)

>  I would like to edit these files, in
> place, in my home directory and have versions saved in a CVS repository that
> is within my controllable file space, i.e. within my home directory.

Bad idea.

>  It
> looks like that is not possible.

nope, it's not.  CVS working directories are "owned" by CVS.  You don't
want to share them with other purposes.  They're for managing your
source files, not running the programs built from those sources.  CVS
doesn't play very well in the same sandbox with other tools that are not
also explicitly working with the same set of source files.

>  It also seems to be the case that CVS must
> create an entire working directory when files are checked out, so I would
> not be able to work on these files in my home directory so that they would
> be in the location where there are normally executed without a separate move
> operation.

s/move operation/copy operation/

"CVS is not a build system"!  ;-)

>  Can someone help this beginner get over this (perhaps only
> mental) block?  Thanks.

If you are already comfortable using RCS, why not just use it directly
for the few ~/.* files in your home directory?

It's not like there's a huge tree full of many files to manage --
they're all in one directory and many of them are probably "stand alone"
(i.e. independent of one another).  RCS commands can easily be applied
directly and uniformly to one group of files in one directory with one
command-line invocation.

Though I do make "releases" of my ~/.* files (using the traditional SCCS
method of uniformly incrementing the release number to start a new
release), not many people will want to make releases of these files, so
you don't need CVS to help with release management either (and if you
use RCS you can either use the traditional release number as I do, or
you can tag all the files as desired).

Finally if you're going to try to share your ~/.* files between several
remote machines then it's probably best that you do follow some sort of
release management scheme for them instead of trying to use CVS as a
distribution tool (which it really isn't! ;-).  I'm now working on the
23'rd release of my ~/.* files since the last time I re-started my SCCS
directory from scratch (1993/11/17), and I really do share them almost
identically to a very wide variety of systems.  A proper, but very
simple, release management scheme is the only way I was able to get this
far and use the same files so widely.

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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