CVS Server Configuration for Eclipse

Question

Okay, I'm not an idiot; really...
I'm an experienced developer, but totally new to Eclipse, and CVS. My wife and I want to work on the same source files from different computers in the same room.

All of our google searches and all of the instructions at Eclipse, etc say something like "The first step is to connect to your configured CVS server." But that's NOT THE FIRST STEP if you don't know what a CVS server is or how to configure it.

My two questions are fairly simple:

1) Is the CVS server something that has come with Eclipse, that I can configure from Eclipse, or is it some third party entity that I must first download from somewhere else and install/configure on http://localhost.

2) Where do I START? What is the REAL "first step". In other words how do I CREATE a repository to connect TO?

Answer 1

First of all, I suggest you forgo CVS and instead go with SVN (CVS' successor) or perhaps git. Second, the steps for installing a server will depend on your environment. If you're on Windows, I highly recommend VisualSVN Server, which is a free SVN server, and is very easy to install and configure.

HTH,
Kent

Answer 2

CVS is a version control system, an important component of Source Configuration Management (SCM). Using it, you can record the history of sources files, and documents.

CVS is a production quality system in wide use around the world, including many free software projects.

and to use it with eclipse you can visit this site http://wiki.eclipse.org/CVS_Howto

check here to know about it and its installation http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/

Answer 3

I don't yet see a full answer to the server setup question, so I'll try my hand:

CVS is a client/server application. This means that you'll need to have a CVS server running on either one of your PCs or a third box. The PCs running Eclipse will need to know the IP address of whichever machine is running the CVS server.

Here's a Web site that claims to get you up and running with a CVS server in 10 minutes: http://weblog.cemper.com/a/200307/28-cvs-version-control-on-windows-in-10-minutes.php

Don't know if they mention this, but CVS needs to be able to get through any firewalls you may have installed. If you can't seem to connect, remember to check on this! It's a common error.

CVS feels a little more comfortable running on Unix/Linux systems than on Windows. CVSNT is reasonably good but there used to be some minor problems with it. Personally, I used to have a CVS server installed on my internet-facing Web server, which was a Linux machine.

In all, I'm optimistic that you can get CVS set up and running with no problem.