About CVS

CVS , the Concurrent Versions System, is an open source versioning software system that supports many if not all of the requirements of an ideal version control system as defined in the previous section. CVS originated as UNIX shell scripts and was eventually re-written as CVS in the late 1980s. CVS shines the most when used to keep track of text files. It does a good job of displaying deltas, merging text differences, and in some cases even adding version information to source files automatically.

CVS is originally a command line tool, but many other tools such as WinCVS and NetBeans provide GUIs to access CVS repositories.

CVS is in widespread use as a means of disseminating open source projects on the Internet. The Apache family of projects, JBoss, and many others offer anonymous CVS access for nightly source drops .