13th meeting

From BLUG

Topic: CVS (Concurrent Versioning System)
Date: Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Time: 7-9pm
Location: Monroe County Public Library room 1B

Presenter: Bob Piercy
Attendance: 10

Pizza and drinks will be served at this meeting.

Synopsis

Robert Piercy will be giving a demonstration on how to use CVS for code version control and project development. He will have two computers setup so that he can use one as the server and one as the client. He will demonstrate how to create a repository, use it, talk about file conflicts, versioning, branching and eclipse development.

This presentation is also good if you are interested in using RCS for local file version control, such as for config files.

Summary

Actually, the turnout was impressive despite the inclimate weather and tornado warnings. There was a tornado warning at 4pm and so we were waiting to find out if the weather would be ok for holding the meeting. After the warning passed at 5pm, I decided to go ahead with it. Bought 2 pizzas from Pizza Express, drinks, etc. Got to the library at 6:45 and no sooner do we start to setup when over the intercom comes an announcement that there is another more severe tornado warning for Monroe County and that we would have to seek shelter in the back of the library by the CATS offices. So we all moved back there for 20 minutes with all the other library patrons (CATS TV saved our lives) . At 7:15 they announced that all was clear (false alarms reduce readiness) and we moved back into 1B to find other BLUGers waiting patiently for the meeting to start.

Bob got started with an explaination of CVS along with some examples of how to create repositories, update, remove and add files, commit changes, view differences and so on. He then demonstrated these functions using a live CVS setup and a quickly written hellocvs.c program in a directory called prj. Because time was short, he moved onto showing off Eclipse SDK, which is an open source IDE based on IBM's VisualAge. Overall, a nice IDE. Its oriented towards java development, but it had good plugin support for other languages like PHP. Bob mentioned a project called Moodle, which is an open source course management system.