Ahh... Concurrent Versions System . Here's more than you want to know about CVS at sourceforge. On the short, it enables several users to write code on their local systems simultaneously and maintains every version of every file ever checked in. For instance, both of us check out a bunch of the same files, update them and create new ones. When we've made significant progress or were done working for the time being, we check in our files. If the other developers have already checked in, a diff program will display the differences and allow us to overwrite, merge, discard, etc.. You may have heard of Merant's PVCS or Microsoft's Visual Source Safe. Both commercial products provide similar features. CVS is opensource and generally included with every version of Unix or Linux that I can think of.
Sourceforge offers CVS services for its hosted projects. Both developers and non-developers can get all of the source code for every project available on sourceforge through CVS. Developers compile or in my case collect all of their source into a binary distributable (zip,tar,exe) and then make that available for download which is known as a release. Don't let me dumb it down though. Volumes have been written and published on it.
Sourceforge allows anyone to view the cvs for each project through the web without installing a client. The problem here is that these pages are not dynamic and seem to be updated on and inconsistent basis. Additionally, the client allows you to download the whole ball of wax whereas the web is one at a time.
Edited by jtokach (2005-01-21 06:20 AM)
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-Jim
...the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.
