Customer Reviews

Open Source Development with CVS: Learn How to Work With Open Source Software

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been using CVS for a couple of years, read the manual and had great success. However, there have been lots of gaps in my understanding and places where I wasn't really sure what was happenning. This book answered those. It has lots of well chosen examples that illustrate points that I've wondered about, but been afraid to try out for fear of really messing up my CVS repository.

The book is a little heavy on the "Open Source" religion, but dismissing it because of that would be a big mistake. This is a fine book.

Open Source Development with CVS Karl Fogel

Here is a chatty discussion of CVS and how to use it. The best thing about the book is that he spends a lot of time discussing his examples. That helps you to understand the output. I also found the troubeshooting section to be more than adequate, and a discussion of pcl-cvs (the plugin to emacs) to be a nice and helpful addition.

Fogel wrote some chapters about open source development. Call them filler or distractions, still it gives insight about how version control management contributes to open source. . The book has an appendix of descriptions of each command and at times Fogel urges the reader to refer to the Cederqvist manual. I actually appreciated that because it allowed Fogel to write about the things not already found in the online manual.

One quibble was with the organization of the book. To learn how to setup CVS from scratch, you need to start by reading chapter 4 (Admin), and then go back and reread chapter 2 (An overview). Maybe a briefer overview would have been better and an explanation of the functions in succeeding chapters.

The chattiness of the chapters (which is a good thing) often made it hard to find the user commands. Perhaps user input could have been highlighted in some way. Also, the discussion of file permissions was simply inadequate. Indeed, chapter 4 contained an error related to permissions on page 112 (what does "+R" mean? ) and didn't discuss sticky bits for group ownership. This was significant, because I couldn't proceed with learning CVS until I could figure out those permissions.

In short: an excellent, invaluable book, but you should consult the Cederqvist manual for the section of file permissions.

I found this book a joy to read. Before ordering this book, I had read the GPL'd chapters online and found them to be quite good so I wanted to support the author with my wallet. I figgured the rest would be the regular pomp about Open Source that we are seeing alot of lately, but I could not have been more incorrect! The author not only knows his technical details about the CVS system, he fully groks the Open Source movement, personalities and community.

The author alternates chapters between community issues (ethics, forking, project maintenance and administration, as well as "people skills") and the technical nuts and bolts of running a CVS server and/or using a CVS client.

While the title touts the Open Source movement, CVS is just as at home in a closed environment, say a web development team, inhouse application development, or anywhere else that you need to track text based files. Mr. Fogel does a good job of showing run of the mill examples and code, as well as some more esoteric uses of CVS commands and utilities.

If you are doing any sort of development and are investigating content version control software this book (and application) are for you.

First off, I would have to say that you'll (or, at least, I did get) get the most out of this book if you read the Per Cederqvist (sp?) manual either beforehand or concurrently. This book uses more of a tutorial, heavily example-oriented approach, whereas the Cederqvist goes feature-by-feature, with small examples. And, before you gripe about the wealth of open-source info in this book, remember that CVS was originally created (at least so I've heard, don't quote me word for word here) to facilite decentralized open-source development. So, that considered, it is infact not at all out of place in this book, and in my case, just as interesting as the rest of the book. I'm a novice config mgr, and I've only been using unix, and more specifically GNU/Linux software for under a year now, but as my skills progress, I'll definately get more involved in the free software movement.

This book in some ways, starts where the Cederqvist leaves off, providing a much needed (for me), and much higher-level exposition of CVS's key features. For example, I didn't really get the 'update -j' semantics until I read this book. Not long afterward, I was writing a lengthy script to automate branch merges, and efter re-reading this book, I found out that you could, infact pass -j to checkout as well, and took a good 40% off of the overhead of my script. CVS wrappers such as log.pl and others are nicely described here as well. True, this book doesn't make the perfect reference, but I've found myself many-a-time frantically flipping through its pages to find out why something I'm doing Isn't working!

But, this book may soon become obsolete, by its author no less. Karl Fogel is part of a development team working on a much desired replacement for cvs. There should be more details at 'subversion.tigris.org' (check out the rest of tigris.org while you're at it)... I'm not sure what state it's in right now, but several months ago I tried checking out the sources to it on a i586 Linux box (i think the sources are covered by the apache license), and was unfortunately not able to build it (oversight on my part?). But, it's up there, for anyone who wants it, and by now it's probably a lot better than when I tried it. Can't wait for the full release :)

I was charged with setting up a CVS setup for our company and have found the book very helpful in explaining things like how to set up a repository and install CVS properly on solaris. I've been reading through the chapters on building and tagging and found the way forward.

Usually the book comes to the rescue when we find we need to extend our use and knowledge of CVS a step further. What more can I say ?

The book looks to be well written with lots of details, but I feel the first few introductory pages are insufficiently detailed which prevented me from setting things up. Specifically:

* The examples don't say whether your supposed to be in or above the working directory for various cvs commands. The reader is supposed to assume that current directory for this example is the same place as the current directory at the end of the previous example, but nothing says that. (it's obvious once you know).

* The overview chapter only talks about importing a whole directory tree. It's not clear how to add a directory or a file to an already imported directory tree. Actually, it's explained 20 pages later, but I didn't find that for a while.

* I made a mistake and imported a working dir subdirectory as a top level directory in the central cvs repository. There's no quick overview commands for removing setup mistakes. (Actually, that's shown about 30 pages after the overview). The book doesn't say that importing a subdirectory if you're in the subdirectory, makes it a top level directory in the CVS repository.

I'm sure once I understand what's going on, it'll be obvious. But to do my basic directory setup, and cleanup from a mistake, I had to wade through all sorts of "once it's working" text to find what I wanted.

Also, in the Removing Directories section, he keeps referring to directories without saying whether he's referring to directories in the user tree or under the CVS repository tree.

This book has 2 aims:

1) To give you all of the knowledge you need to use and administer CVS, and

2) To provide you with insight on the Open Source movement and management of an Open Source project

On both accounts, Kurt does a top-notch job. His explanations for (1) were detailed, provided command-line input and output to leave no question as to what's supposed to happen, and the language was familiar and easy to read. It is thus far a head above any other book on CVS I've found. His thoughts on (2) obviously showed a strong familiarity with Open Source combined with a realistic and analytical view that I would liken to combining parts of The Cathedral and the Bazaar with an instruction manual.

I highly recommend it. I'd buy it again if I didn't already own it ;-)

I've been considering source control for a long time, but a few months ago it became really critical. I started studying RCS but it was too low-level for what I needed. Then I found out CVS, but the documentation on the web was more for reference than for practical, quick learning and application. This book was really what i needed: its practical but precise approach taught me many helpful concepts saving me lots of time. It's never boring, it's not either too long neither too short.

I cannot over-emphasize how useful this book was to me while setting up my cvs repository on Linux. All the examples were germane and were correct, and the gotcha-s were highlighted. I go back to this book all the time. I cannot make any comment regarding the worthiness of this book for folks trying to install cvs on NT, as I blithely skipped over any NT commentary, but as far as Linux/UNIX installation, the book was vital. I fully agree with the high rating this book has enjoyed.

This is an excellent book about open source development. Chapters on the specifics of CVS are interspersed with chapters on the nuts and bolts of running an open source project. (Fogel adheres to the GPL, under which CVS is released, by making the 'source' of the chapters about CVS available from the 'net). This is the book to read after 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'.