31.1. Introduction to CVS

CVS stands for Concurrent Versions System and is a set of programs that allows multiple developers to work on the same source code without interfering with each other. This chapter assumes that you are already familiar with the workings of CVS and want to know how to set up a server that allows a repository to be accessed over the network. A server allows people to check out code to their personal computers, work on it, and then check it back in again over the network.

There are actually several ways of making a repository network-accessible, such as via SSH or RSH. The method that Webmin supports is the running of CVS in pserver mode from a super server like inetd or xinetd. There is no actual separate CVS server process that runs all the time in the background, like Apache or an NFS daemon. Instead, the CVS program is run by inetd only when a client CVS program connects to it.

To control who can access files, a CVS server uses username and password authentication. The supplied login can be checked against the system UNIX user list or a separate file of usernames and passwords. Users can be given full read-write access to the repository or read-only access to prevent them from checking in files.