Essential CVS (Essentials)

Appendix. Clients and Operating Systems

Some people like using the command line during development; others prefer graphical interfaces. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) also use colors and shapes to make output clearer or make the sandbox easier to work with.

Graphical CVS interfaces are available for Windows, Macintosh, Unix, and Linux systems, and there are also two Java graphical interfaces that run on any operating system with a Java Runtime Environment. These GUIs were written by third-party developers and do not come with CVS.

Third-party developers have also written tools to provide an interface between CVS and several of the common integrated development environments (IDEs). These interfaces are most useful to programmers and are available for Microsoft Visual Studio, MetroWerks CodeWarrior, NetBeans, GNU Emacs, and anything that uses the SCC-API (Common Source Code Control Application Programming Interface). IDEs that support the SCC-API include Macromedia ColdFusion, Sybase PowerBuilder, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

CVS is designed for the Unix and Linux operating systems, and it relies on the features of those operating systems. It can behave in unexpected ways when used from a different operating system. The most obvious problem is that Windows operating systems use a different character for line endings than Unix-based systems do. CVS corrects for that particular problem, but other problems are explained in this appendix.