CVS -- A tool for collaborative development of software tools.


The Green Party Code Weavers Network exists to facilitate the collaboration of Green Party activists actively engaged in developing and supporting the Information Technology resources and infrastructure of their national, state and local Green Parties and our respective candidate and issue campaigns.

We're here to provide mutual support and technical assistance, to share code and useful software tools and to learn from one another in ways which will support the development of the Green Party in our respective communities and states.

With the generous support of the Green Internet Society, we provide three key resources for our collaboration with one another: (1) this website, (2) our e-mail listserve and (3) a CVS repository where Network participants are encouraged to share custom code that might benefit the Party building work we each do in our respective states and communities.

If you would like to puruse and try out the software tools Greens have developed to support Green Party organizing, participate in its development or share your own software development projects with the group, please request a userID and password by calling (404-247-4818) or writing <hesco-cwn-cvs-admin@greens.org>.

For those of you who have not yet requested a userID and password to our CVS repository, let me urge you to do so. We need your participation in our various projects to support Party building across this nation and around the world.

If you are not already familiar with Concurrent Version System and how it can help facilitate collaborative development of software tools, you are urged to check out the following resources:

There are plenty of graphical tools which know how to communicate with a CVS server. 

For a list of open source options, for a variety of platforms, check out:  

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/cvsgui/


If you do things the old fashioned way, working from a command line, and are unfamiliar with CVS, follow the links below, invoke a shell and try out the commands listed at the bottom of this note as a place to get started.

Then login and import your personal projects which might benefit the Party and its organizing work. The Green Party Code Weavers Network CVS Repository is not the place to share your latest computer game. Sourceforge and other repositories can provide that. And in fact, if you are developing a project wil wider applicability than our own Party building you are urged to participate with that broader community, while sharing a link to your project with the GP-CWN so we can direct folks to your site from this web site.

But if you have written a useful report generator that turns a voter database into a walking list for the next lit drop; or some model volunteer forms for your web site, and the php or cgi scripts to clean the data, stash it in a database, enhance it with data from your state's registered voter database, alert your local affiliates of the new interest and generate a "Welcome home to the Green Party" letter for your membership development coordinator's signature, this is a great place to share that with the Party activists who have the skills to put your code to work building the Green Party in states and counties across this nation.

Your coding skills can do more than help build your local or state party, they could benefit Greens across the nation, and perhaps around the world.

For some basics on CVS, the following are recommended: 

First, a few short CVS Primers found on a Google search:  

	http://cepa.fnal.gov/psm/simulation/cvs_primer.shtml

		<-- just the commands, silly, a three page cheat sheet  

	http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~finney/sys-admin/cvs.html

		<-- a five minute narrative 

	http://www.cs.washington.edu/orgs/acm/tutorials/dev-in-unix/cvs.html

		<-- a ten minutes narrative 

	http://www.psc.edu/~semke/cvs_branches.html

		<-- five minutes on trunks, branches, merging and diverging 



next, the comprehensive manuals on the subject:  

	The GNU CVS Concurrent Versions System Manual 

	http://www.gnu.org/software/cvs/manual/  <-- multiple formats 

 
	The old faithful Cederqvist Manual 

	http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/  <-- multiple formats 



	The Red Bean CVS Book 

	http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html

		<-- an excerpt of the following 



	Open SourceDevelopment with CVS 

	http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/  <-- multiple formats 

	http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/OSDevWithCVS_3E.pdf

		<-- this pdf version is a handy addition to your Documentation folder  

		a hard copy of a couple of chapters are useful in your library
Or for the quick two minute tour, try this cheat sheet.
From a command line, in your local sandbox, type: 
 
	
~/sandbox$ CVSROOT=:pserver:yourID@gandhi.greens.org:/var/lib/cvs  
	
~/sandbox$ export CVSROOT 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs -d :pserver:yourID@gandhi.greens.org:/var/lib/cvs login 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs co mmbrutils 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs co stv-counter 
	
~/sandbox$ ls -l mmbrutils/ 
	
~/sandbox$ ls -l stv-counter/ 
	
~/sandbox$ cd /path/to/your/project 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs import -m "initial import of yourproject" yourproject yourID start
	
~/sandbox$ cd .. 
	
~/sandbox$ mv yourproject yourproject-bu 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs co yourproject 
	
~/sandbox$ ls -l yourproject 
	
~/sandbox$ cd yourproject 
 
		<--- or to one of the other project directories created 
 
		by the checkout (cvs co) commands above  
 
	
~/sandbox$ vim ascript.pl 
 
		<--- make and save some changes 
 
	
~/sandbox$ cvs commit


That should serve as a pretty thorough test of the basic, most commonly used cvs features. CVS offers so much more for those who will read up on it and try their hand at a shell prompt. But this is 95% of what you need to know, right there in those fourteen shell commands.

Happy coding. And we look forward to reading your work in our repository.

originally published on the Network's list, as:
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 22:30:52 -0400
From: Hugh Esco
To: db-workers@ml.greens.org
Subject: [Db-workers] Where Now our Green Code Weavers Network?

--
+---------------------------------------------
| Hugh Esco, 404-806-0480
| Political Coordinator, Georgia Green Party
| Post Office Box 5332; Atlanta GA 31107
| http://www.greens.org/georgia/
+---------------------------------------------
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