[GLLUG] CVS newbie

[Charles Ulrich]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 17:17, Mark Szidik/mlc wrote:
> I am new to CVS, I want to use it in a bit of a less traditional way - for
> tracking website changes.   Does anyone do that?  What I am confused about
> is where the web server should look to for it's copy of the site.  Does it
> look in the CVROOT's repository location?  That seems to make sense to me
> since any updates to the repository will get to the website immediately.
> Or does it work better to occasionally checkout the site to the location
> where the web server looks for the files?

Mark,

Others have answered the web site question, but I'd like to suggest that
you perhaps look into Subversion for revision management of your web
site. Two major benefits to using Subversion for holding web sites are:

- File management is a whole lot easier and cleaner. No moving deleted
files to the Attic, etc. Subversion tracks all changes made to the
filename and its location in the same place that it stores changes to
the file itself. CVS can only record changes made to the contents of the
file.
- Subversion handles binaries far better. CVS has is great at handling
code and plain text, but not so good with binaries. Subversion was built
with binary support in mind, so you can quite easily store and track
changes to literally any kind of file.

Appendix A of the free book, Version Control with Subversion, lists some
of the key differences between CVS and Subversion.

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/svnbook/apa.html

Hope this doesn't sound too much like an advertisement, but we just
started using Subversion extensively where I work and we've found it to
be very slick and it's already saved us a couple times.

Charles
-- 
http://bityard.net