1.5. The advantages of using CVS

CVS is a very useful tool and can help you in your development, no matter if you are an independant developer or are part of a team of developers.

• What is CVS all about?
• What are its advantages?

The official CVS website (http://www.cvshome.org/new_users.html) has more detailed answers to these questions, but here are some brief points of interest.

• Checkout "historic" points in time or milestones in a project, for example when an e-commerce site went "live" or before a major branch in the code.
• Revert to older versions of a file, directory, or an entire website.
• Branching releases. Concurrently develop an unstable development version as well as fix bugs in the stable production version.
• Multiple developers can work on the same catalog and even the same file at the same time. (For more information about how multiple simultaneous writes are merged and conflicts resolved, see the CVS docs in the Resources Appendix).
• CVS is better than ftp for file transfer, because it automatically downloads only changed files, and even then, only the portion of the file that has changed (using patches).
• CVS can automatically merge two simultaneous writes to the same file by different developers.
• Allows one to keep track of the changes that have been made over time (many release managers repackage CVS commit logs into WHATSNEW, HISTORY, and/or NEWS files).