There are times when you will have a project that multiple clients will be using and some of them may have permanent minor changes that need to remain even if bug fixes or code updates are made. Initially branches in CVS seem to be able to fulfill these needs, but the examples that the CVS documentation used had branches to separate to its own entity. Basically branches were only used as a bug fix branch for a particular early version. This way the bug fixes from the branch could be applied to the HEAD. I have found a relatively simple way to synchronize multiple clients each having their own changes using a single common HEAD as the generic project. Current development can be made against the head and when major releases are tagged, the release can be propagated to the clients at their own speed. The only requirement is that certain standards must be followed in order to be take advantage of the ability, but a certain amount of standardization should be performed anyway.

I have found patch files to be very helpful while using FreeBSD. Although I only use patch for altering program code, it could essentially be used in many other areas. Since not everyone is able to use CVS or Subversion because of skill level or have no write access to the repository, patch files are a basic, low level means of communicating changes to a particular file, without having to keep track of these changes yourself. This is especially important in code, since quick changes can quickly become out of hand. Patch files are also useful for the person implementing those changes. The patch file format that I currently use for tracking changes easily shows the differences between whole directory trees. This way you have a central location to view the changes that you’ve made. Another advantage is that patch automatically creates backup files for you so that if something goes wrong, you do not have to dig through the changes to fix the problem. This should get you started with using patch.

I use CVS as my source control system for essentially everything. Although some of the tools that interface with CVS such as Eclipse, there are a whole lot of tricky, painful CVS details that can sneak up on you. Not only that but using the command line version of CVS can be even more daunting since the one cvs executable handles all the 31 commands. Information references such as ‘man cvs‘ and ‘info cvs‘ are helpful, but the length of both is extreme. I’ll try to go over some of the benefits, setup, and use in this article and more to follow.