8.1. CVS Notification via Jabber

CVS—the Concurrent Versions System—allows you to comfortably create and manage versions of the sources of your project. The most common use for CVS is to create and manage versions of program source code, but it can be readily used for any text files. For example, this book was written using DocBook SGML (http://www.docbook.org), and a CVS repository was used to manage different versions of the manuscript throughout the writing and editing process. CVS allowed us to maintain the original source files for the chapters, to compare those versions against edited files, and served as a place from which older versions could be retrieved. You can find out more about CVS at http://www.cvshome.org.

That's the "Versions System" part of CVS's name. The "Concurrent" part means that this facility is given an extra dimension in the form of group collaboration. With CVS, more than one person can share work on a project, and the various chunks of work carried out by each participant are coordinated—automatically, to a large extent—by CVS. Multiple changes by different people to the same file can be merged by CVS; any unresolvable conflicts (which may for example arise when more than one person changes exactly the same line of source code) are flagged and must be resolved by the participants involved.