To set up a CVS repository, first choose the machine and disk on which you want to store the revision history of the source files. CPU and memory requirements are modest, so most machines should be adequate. For details see section Server requirements.
To estimate disk space requirements, if you are importing RCS files from another system, the size of those files is the approximate initial size of your repository, or if you are starting without any version history, a rule of thumb is to allow for the server approximately three times the size of the code to be under CVS for the repository (you will eventually outgrow this, but not for a while). On the machines on which the developers will be working, you'll want disk space for approximately one working directory for each developer (either the entire tree or a portion of it, depending on what each developer uses).
The repository should be accessible (directly or via a networked file system) from all machines which want to use CVS in server or local mode; the client machines need not have any access to it other than via the CVS protocol. It is not possible to use CVS to read from a repository which one only has read access to; CVS needs to be able to create lock files (see section Several developers simultaneously attempting to run CVS).
To create a repository, run the cvs init
command. It will set up an empty repository in the
CVS root specified in the usual way
(see section The Repository). For example,
cvs -d /usr/local/cvsroot init
cvs init is careful to never overwrite any
existing files in the repository, so no harm is done if
you run cvs init on an already set-up
repository.
cvs init will enable history logging; if you
don't want that, remove the history file after running
cvs init. See section The history file.
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