The overall structure of the repository is a directory tree corresponding to the directories in the working directory. For example, supposing the repository is in
/usr/local/cvsroot
here is a possible directory tree (showing only the directories):
/usr
 |
 +--local
 |   |
 |   +--cvsroot
 |   |    |
 |   |    +--CVSROOT
          |      (administrative files)
          |
          +--gnu
          |   |
          |   +--diff
          |   |   (source code to GNU diff)
          |   |
          |   +--rcs
          |   |   (source code to RCS)
          |   |
          |   +--cvs
          |       (source code to CVS)
          |
          +--yoyodyne
              |
              +--tc
              |    |
              |    +--man
              |    |
              |    +--testing
              |
              +--(other Yoyodyne software)
With the directories are history files for each file under version control. The name of the history file is the name of the corresponding file with `,v' appended to the end. Here is what the repository for the `yoyodyne/tc' directory might look like:
  $CVSROOT
    |
    +--yoyodyne
    |   |
    |   +--tc
    |   |   |
            +--Makefile,v
            +--backend.c,v
            +--driver.c,v
            +--frontend.c,v
            +--parser.c,v
            +--man
            |    |
            |    +--tc.1,v
            |
            +--testing
                 |
                 +--testpgm.t,v
                 +--test2.t,v
The history files contain, among other things, enough
information to recreate any revision of the file, a log
of all commit messages and the user-name of the person
who committed the revision.  The history files are
known as RCS files, because the first program to
store files in that format was a version control system
known as RCS.  For a full
description of the file format, see the man page
rcsfile(5), distributed with RCS, or the
file `doc/RCSFILES' in the CVS source
distribution.  This
file format has become very common--many systems other
than CVS or RCS can at least import history
files in this format.
The RCS files used in CVS differ in a few ways from the standard format. The biggest difference is magic branches; for more information see section Magic branch numbers. Also in CVS the valid tag names are a subset of what RCS accepts; for CVS's rules see section Tags--Symbolic revisions.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.