Some facts about the Concurrent Versions System (CVS):- I am the author of CVS, the most popular source code control tool used by the Open Source community [[ when I first wrote this entry in 2006 ]].
- CVS is the backbone of Sourceforge.net and has been home to over 100,000 Open Source projects, has more than 1 million registered Open Source developers, and serves up more than 19 million unique visitors each month
- CVS is referenced in 172 books according to a Google Book Search for "Concurrent Versions System".
- CVS was honored when it won the 2003 USENIX STUG Award. Other winners of this prestigious award have included Python, BitTorrent, Apache, SSH, Tcl/Tk, Perl, and GCC, putting CVS in very good company.
- I wrote CVS in roughly 2 weeks back in 1989, then nursed it through a number of enhancement releases for the following few years. The Open Source community and some key contributions (like the client-server support) were pivotal in making CVS a useful tool for the masses (and, the price was always right).
- I presented the CVS II: Parallelizing Software Development paper at the 1990 Winter USENIX Conference in Washington, DC.
CVS was the model for Subversion, which sought to overcome some of the limitation in CVS. Subversion was, in fact, created by the maintainers of CVS. I am a current user of Subversion and quite pleased with how they have taken CVS to the next level.
Some useful links for the Concurrent Versions System (CVS):
Some Books about CVS (search Google Books for many more):
- Pragmatic Version Control: With CVS, September 2003.
- CVS Pocket Reference, September 2003.
- Open Source Development with CVS, August 2003.
- Professional Java Tools: Real World Ant, JUnit, CVS, Cactus, Bugzilla, Maven, Jmeter, and Xdoctet, August 2003.
- Essential CVS, June 2003.
- Version Management with CVS, December 2002.
- Professional Linux Programming, Chapter 2, September 2000.
I hope you have found CVS useful in your career and has helped you develop great products.
-Brian
