Building Your First CVS Repository - Checking Out Files (Page 4 of 4 )
CVS stores projects and files in a central repository, but you work from a working copy, the sandbox, in your local directories. You create the sandbox with cvs checkout.
CVS creates the sandbox as a subdirectory of your current working directory. I like to create a directory to contain all my CVS sandboxes, and I use ~/cvs. Run this command from whichever directory you want a sandbox created in:
cvs -d repository_path checkout project_name
It checks out all files for the named project. If your repository is on the local machine, the repository path is the full pathname of the CVS repository. If your repository is on a remote server, see the preceding section, “Accessing Remote Repositories.” Example 2-10 shows a local checkout.
Example 2-10. Local repository checkout
$ mkdir ~/cvs
$ cd ~/cvs
$ cvs -d /var/lib/cvsroot checkout example
cvs checkout: Updating example
U example/file1
U example/file2
The checkout command puts a copy of the project’s files and subdirectories into a directory named for the project, created in the current working directory. It also puts some administrative files of its own in a subdirectory of the project directory, called CVS.
You can check out an individual file or subdirectory of a project by replacing project_name with the pathname to the file or directory, from the project’s root directory. See Chapter 3 for more information.
CVS stores the repository path as part of the sandbox, so you should never again need to use -d repository_path in commands executed within that sandbox.
Note that the repository paths for local or remote checkout are the same as the repository paths for local and remote import. So if you used -d /var/lib/cvsroot for the import, you’d use the same for checkout.
If you are checking out a sandbox from a remote repository, the repository path must follow the remote repository format introduced in “Accessing Remote Repositories,” earlier in this chapter. Example 2-11 shows a checkout from a remote repository. Figure 2-6 shows the same checkout with gCVS.
Example 2-11. Remote repository checkout
$ cvs -d :ext:cvs_server:/var/lib/cvsroot checkout example
cvs checkout: Updating example
U example/file1
U example/file2
Figure 2-6. Remote repository checkout with gCVS
Editing Files
Once you’ve checked out your project files into a sandbox, you can edit them with your favorite editor. Your sandbox is an ordinary set of files and directories, with an extra CVS subdirectory in each directory. Ignore the contents of the CVS subdirectory, and edit your project files as you normally would.
Some of CVS’s functions will not work properly in files with complex formats, such as image or sound files, and these files should be stored in binary format (see Chapter 3 for more information). The default save file format of editors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org doesn’t react well with the line-based diff system that CVS uses, and these files should also be stored in the repository as binary files, using the -kb option to cvs add (as explained in Chapter 3). However, if you save in plain-text, RTF, XML, or HTML format, you can commit them as normal CVS files.
Please check back next week for the conclusion of this article.
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 This article is excerpted from chapter two of Essential CVS, Second Edition, written by Jennifer Vesperman (O'Reilly; ISBN: 0596527039). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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