I'll not discuss whether or not CVS is the best choice over other free and commercial Version Control Systems, I'll instead show how CVS is used and give some small tips. This first part deals with setting up CVS locally, checking out a project and getting updates. Setup Before you start using CVS you'd better setup a couple of environment variables.
All examples uses bash syntax.
First the CVS root needs to be set, this tells the CVS program were to look for projects unless another root is set explicitly. The user name which has CVS access. The server on which the repository resides. The path on the server to the repository. One last thing you should do is to set the default editor for committing changes.