11. Revision management

If you have read this far, you probably have a pretty good grasp on what CVS can do for you. This chapter talks a little about things that you still have to decide.

If you are doing development on your own using CVS you could probably skip this chapter. The questions this chapter takes up become more important when more than one person is working in a repository.

11.1 When to commit?

Your group should decide which policy to use regarding commits. Several policies are possible, and as your experience with CVS grows you will probably find out what works for you.

If you commit files too quickly you might commit files that do not even compile. If your partner updates his working sources to include your buggy file, he will be unable to compile the code. On the other hand, other persons will not be able to benefit from the improvements you make to the code if you commit very seldom, and conflicts will probably be more common.

It is common to only commit files after making sure that they can be compiled. Some sites require that the files pass a test suite. Policies like this can be enforced using the commitinfo file (see section C.3.2 Commitinfo), but you should think twice before you enforce such a convention. By making the development environment too controlled it might become too regimented and thus counter-productive to the real goal, which is to get software written.