CVS Server Administration Tips? 79
Twintop asks: "The company I'm working for has asked me to take over administration of their CVS server for a decent sized project. The current setup of the CVS server needs to be wiped clean and started fresh. The only times I've ever used CVS (and used it poorly at that) was with a few SourceForge.net (An OSTG Site) projects. What are some suggestions on reference materials for a newbie to CVS (but not to Linux) and methods of administration that have worked for you in the past?"
The reason we don't ask (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right that there is nothing that beats personal experience. Yet you belittle people for asking to learn from the personal experience of others.
I hate to break this to you, but Google is not always your friend. There is a lot of good information and a lot of garbage there too. One must sort out the garbage from the good. But if you don't know enough about the information, how do you tell the garbage from the good? He could spend weeks trying to sort out the info. Which is the option you want people like him to choose. Just as long as it doesn't take any of your precious time. You may be an expert in the field and know the good from the garbage at a glance. Not everyone is. If you are an expert, you may know which are the best terms to use in the search. Is "CVS Administration" better than "Administering CVS?" Perhaps "Best Practices CVS Administration" is a better search term. But someone not knowing CVS could spend way too much time just trying to refine the search to bring up the needed info, let alone actually learning from the best info.
People like you do a lot to lower the average intelligence of humanity. I hope that you never have children. They would learn to be afraid of asking questions. They would learn that it is better to be ignorant than to try to learn.
If you think that a question is stupid, you have the right to that opinion. However, once you have the reputation of a blowhard, there is little point in talking, since few listen to the wind. I, for one, will not listen to the wind anymore.
Best advice I can give... (Score:3, Insightful)
Assume the absolute worst possible scenarios will occur and plan for them.
This means make sure that your system is secured and updated as possible, especially the CVS software.
Force ssh access, don't allow pserver access at all.
Ensure that a daily backup occurs and that you have backups for at least a week.
Triple-check your permissions on all the CVS directories.
Don't run the CVS server as root unless you absolutely have to (and I don't think you have to).
Re:Do Not Branch; Backup the Repository; Test Alwa (Score:2, Insightful)
Other recommendations:
1. Keep the directory structure relatively flat, makes updates faster and output easier to scan.
2. Separate different domains into different CVS modules. What I mean is, you shouldn't have to update all the tests and all the documentation, just to update your source tree.
Don't use CVS! (Score:2, Insightful)
Branching works. (Score:2, Insightful)
Heard? Then you actually haven't tried it? I've always heard branching didn't work very well in CVS also, however we implemented it on a large (2000 plus classes), several branches in fact, and it worked fine.