CVS and Subversion Hosting Service

CVS Repositories

We provide a hosting service for CVS repositories: any staff or postgraduate researcher who needs to share files with other people (anywhere on the internet) can take advantage of it. We can set up a CVS repository for such files on our dedicated CVS server. You (the researcher) will still be in overall charge of your files, but some of the tedious administrative work will be done for you, for example setting up access to the repository for people who want to use it. If you have files you'd like to share with other people and you'd like a CVS repository, get in touch to find out more.

If you need access to an existing CVS repository, please use the CVS access page. If you already have access but have forgotten your CVS password, just apply for access again and the new password that you choose will replace your old one.

You can also browse some of our CVS repositories on the web.

Note that the CVS repository that holds the School of Informatics' official web pages is entirely separate from this service! To find out about that see the web section of the Systems pages and the web section of the Support FAQ.

CVS is a "Source Control" or "Revision Control" tool designed to keep track of source changes made by groups of developers working on the same files, allowing them to stay in sync with each other as each individual chooses.

If you're looking for help with CVS, the manual is installed on all DICE machines and can be viewed with the command info cvs (or via the Info button in xemacs). It's also available on the web at the CVS home site.

A particularly helpful book to read is Open Source Development with CVS by Karl Fogel and Moshe Bar. The complete book is available for free online.

Subversion Repositories

We also host Subversion repositories. Subversion is designed to replace CVS and to overcome its shortcomings. The Subversion project's home page lists its main features (e.g. versioning of directories and binary files, properly atomic commits), as well as being a source of documentation and help.

We can host Subversion repositories for anyone in Informatics, but bear in mind that - unlike with CVS repositories - all users of a Subversion repository currently have to have their own DICE account. This may make it less attractive if you're an enthusiastic international collaborator, but if the people who need to use your repository will all have DICE accounts then Subversion is a good option.

As with CVS, there's a very helpful complete free book available online, Version Control with Subversion by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick & C. Michael Pilato.