User-level CVS Stuff

Paths

The cvs executable is the main program you'll interact with. Usually it lives in /usr/local/bin, but sometimes it can live in /usr/bin, or something weird like /usr/local/cvs/bin. Try looking in those places first, and if you can't find cvs, ask someone to install it for you.
Once you've located cvs, put it in your path.

Environment Variables

Like just about all Unix software, CVS likes to have some environment variables set for it to function correctly.
You must have CVSROOT set to the path to your repository. For ArsDigita, that's usually /cvsweb.
Here are the environment variables you may want to tweak

CVSROOT The path where CVS can find the repository (the place it stores past and current revisions of files)
If we ever move to a client/server setup, CVSROOT would become hostname:/path
CVSEDITOR The editor CVS uses when prompting for check-in comments. It defaults to "vi". If you're not using the emacs version control stuff, set this environment variable to your favorite editor
CVSIGNORE A list of files for CVS to ignore when doing cvs update. If you're a C developer, you'd have this set to someting like ".depend *.o core" so that CVS wouldn't think your core files are worthy to be checked in.

markd@badgertronics.com

$Id: user-stuff.html,v 1.2 1999/12/23 21:49:10 markd Exp $

`CVSROOT`	The path where CVS can find the repository (the place it stores past and current revisions of files) If we ever move to a client/server setup, CVSROOT would become `hostname:/path`
`CVSEDITOR`	The editor CVS uses when prompting for check-in comments. It defaults to "`vi`". If you're not using the emacs version control stuff, set this environment variable to your favorite editor
`CVSIGNORE`	A list of files for CVS to ignore when doing `cvs update`. If you're a C developer, you'd have this set to someting like `".depend *.o core"` so that CVS wouldn't think your core files are worthy to be checked in.