CVS in Windows Vista Best Practice?

Question

I have to start using CVS at my new company so that I can play nicely with the developers who are all *nix users. I happen to be a Windows Vista user and unfortunately do not have the ability to switch anytime soon. I am also not exactly a command line guru yet, so any simplified method is ideal for me.

I discovered TortoiseCVS today and it seems pretty straight forward, even though it says it is not directly supported on Vista, which worries me a little.

My questions:

1. Do you use CVS on Windows (Vista)?
2. What method do you use? (Tortoise CVS? Another option?)
3. Does your method get along well with repositories setup on/by *nix machines?
4. Any other advice for the noob? (Thanks)

Answer 1

If you're using an IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse, you should look for the appropriate plugin that integrates with your environment. Those might be better supported (though TortoiseCVS is likely just fine, even if the developers don't want to make any claims).

Answer 2

There are some other avenues you can take to interact with your *nix bretheren.

1. Install VirtualBox and a distribution of Linux so you can natively run the same toolset.
2. Install VirtualBox and a copy of Windows XP, which is known to work with TortoiseCVS.

You can find VMWare appliances pre-loaded with a linux distribution, which you can import into VMWare Player or VirtualBox. From there you just need to connect up to your shared drive the same way that they do.

Please note that CVS is no longer being maintained. You should really be moving to SVN, git, or some other version control system.

Answer 3

I know many people who required a gentle introduction to cvs and ended up using WinCVS with no real difficulty. I know many others who are using the cvs client in Eclipse. This usage includes projects which are not otherwise managed by Eclipse. As for myself, I stick to the command-line myself because I feel the lack of GUI abstractions helps me to always understand exactly what CVS is doing. All three solutions work well on Vista, 32 and 64 bit. Our shop uses Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Windows, with the server on a Linux machine, and we never have any problems with compatibility.

There's one issue you should be aware of regardless of your choice of cvs client for cross-platform goodness, though. Most cvs clients convert between Unix newlines (on the server) and Windows newlines (on the client) by default. You should understand that this conversion is happening and be aware of the consequences.

• This conversion will cause real problems if you try to commit a file with Unix newlines. So, you need to avoid, for example, copying files from a Unix repository to your Windows box, editing them, and committing them unless you've done the newline conversion. We had some real problems with this in my shop, and I instituted a strict policy that people should only communicate files between machines by committing them to CVS. Never, for example, by email, shared network directories, etc.
• If your CVS repository has any binary files, some may not have been properly tagged as binary files. In *nix-only shop, nobody would notice, as the binary flag won't affect most binary files. But in a cross-platform shop, the binary flag routinely affects how cvs treats files, since it will disable any attempts at newline conversion. Typically, any file which was committed from a Unix box will be correctly represented in the repository, so you can fix the problem on the Windows end by merely changing the tag and re-updating. I.e.,

cvs admin -kb file
cvs update -A file