Going retro: Learning CVS, coming from SVN

Question

I've used Subversion since (insert year from early previous decade) but now am at a company using CVS. There are plenty of how-to guides, tutorials, cheatsheets, etc for people going from old version control systems to newer, but what is there for the few of us heading the "wrong" way?

I'm looking for cheatsheets, tips, gotchas for current experienced developers comfortable and totally on board with svn, git, or other popular system. Do not want stuff for version control newbies, or essays extolling the virtues of CVS as compared to whatever was used back in the "64K RAM is plenty" days.

Kassala

You're better to do RCS than muck everything up with CVS. – Idolatrous

First tool like that i ever used was SCCS. Nowadays, all i remember about it is how to spell it. – Kassala

I think there is a git-cvs command or something similar, though I haven't used it. If you know git at all you might look into that. – Sailing

Second @MatrixFrog's comment -- if you can get away with it, run a modern version-control system on your private working directory, and use its features to push to CVS when you have something to commit. This will shield you from many of the atrocities of CVS, and allows you to commit / revert / muck round much more freely. – Delacroix

(Hi, it's me again, comment got too long ...) I wish I could tell you more by way of actual experience, but I only briefly have had to go back from SVN / Darcs / what have you, and been slightly surprised by how pedestrian CVS was. If you can learn RCS (which should only take an afternoon -- it only handles single files, not "projects" in directory trees) it should be easy to see how CVS was grafted on top of that, and what some of the problems were with that approach. I don't agree with @vol7ron, CVS did have advantages and in your situation, using just RCS is not an option anyway. – Delacroix

Answer 1

Good luck.

Since you're very experienced with Subversion, I'm going to recommend a reference you never would have thought of: the Subversion manual.

In an appendix, Subversion for CVS Users, they describe how to break bad CVS habits and start using SVN, as their goal is for Subversion to take over the CVS world.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to reverse-engineer this appendix. Read through it, smiling as you recall the halcyon days of atomic commits, but grimacing as you realize what branching will cost you now.

More seriously, the appendix will often review features in CVS, assuming that people are familiar with them, and then provide a link to the manual where the superior SVN feature is described. You just need to work backwards. You know what you want to do in your own head, and you know you used to do it this way, but you see there's this whole other way to do it. Then ask a co-worker (or read the CVS manual) to learn it in more depth.

Debus

+1 Aha! I didn't think of that, since I wasn't a CVS user when I started with Subversion. – Kassala