Concurrent Versions System

Today myself and Steve set up the CVS repository for the lab. Till date the lab members were using their local home directory for saving their program.

Recently, I am at the receiving end of the Knowledge transfer from a fellow lab-mate who will be graduating very soon. I found it daunting to keep up with the code, like copying it from her home directory to a local server and then to mine and keeping track of the changes. I desperately wanted to set up a source code control for this purpose. As usual my lazy mind thought that this is going to be tough job and didn't budge. But suddently I recollected what gopi (manager at Tejas) used to say to me. "JUST DO IT MAN! JUST DO IT! IF YOU DO IT TODAY, IT CAN BE PEACEFULLY USED IN THE FUTURE.... OTHERWISE YOU WILL ALWAYS LIVE AMONG THE CRAP, INSTEAD OF CLEANING IT"... He used to say this everytime when I felt lazy to do the "code cleaning/augmenting job/cool automation for an otherwise dull job" that he had suggested.

So today morning, I started looking for how to set a CVS server. It is very simple.
- use "cvs -d init"
that's it. repository is created.

I tried creating it in my local machine and was successful. Even tried out some basic cvs operations. I informed this to Steve and he created the repository in the main server. All the job was done in less than 1 hour. I have even started using CVS, As I am typing this blog all the code that was written by me is checked in.

If I had been lazy to install CVS now, then I would have been using the same old shit method through out my PhD life. Now that I have set up the basic CVS, I can peacefully code the rest of my research work, for the next 3 years. Thanks Gopi!!!!