Java Reference
In-Depth Information
and the differences between 1.2 and 1.1. This means that it is always very effi-
cient to get the latest version of any file. (Other systems have tried keeping the
original and the deltas for each revision going forward—but that gets very ex-
pensive to retrieve versions with hundreds of modifications. With CVS, the
latest version is always at hand.)
An exception to this are “binary” files, those on which CVS can't do key-
word substitutions. The revisions of those files, such as JPEG image files, won't
be stored by deltas, but by complete copies of each revision.
8.3
A GUI:
J
CVS
If you are a die-hard GUI kind of developer, and aren't yet convinced of the
power and convenience of the command line, then reread Section 1.3.10. If
you are still not convinced, that's OK—you can still use CVS with the help of
a GUI written entirely in Java. This is an implementation of the CVS client,
that is, the portion of the CVS system that communicates with a remote server.
The server does the real work of managing the versions; the client collects the
data, manages the local files, and communicates with the server.
If you're going to use jCVS, you will need to get a CVS server up and
running—or maybe your project administrator has already done that. If so,
read on.
8.3.1
jCVS can be downloaded from
www.jcvs.org
where you can get it as a zipped
archive file. Unzip it into a directory and create a shell script to make it easy to
invoke. Since jCVS is an actual Java program, all the shell script needs to do is
to ensure that its JAR files are on the
CLASSPATH
and then invoke the jCVS
main class.
Here's a straightforward shell script which will accomplish that:
Installing jCVS
JCVS="/usr/local/jCVS-5.2.2"
CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}:${JCVS}/jars/activation.jar"
CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}:${JCVS}/jars/jcvsii.jar"
CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}:${JCVS}/jars/jh.jar"
CLASSPATH="${CLASSPATH}:${JCVS}/jars/js.jar"
java -jar ${JCVS}/jars/jcvsii.jar
