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Basic CVS Concepts
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	CVS is the Concurent Versions System. It was originally designed
to be used as a source code management and revision control system, but
people use it for all sorts of things these days.

	
Client/server

	CVS is essentially client/server oriented. This can be a little
confusing because the client and server can be on the same machine, and
don't necessarily need to use the network. 

	More accurate terms than client/server are probably
repository/client. There is a repository of all the source code
sitting somewhere, and information on all the changes that have been made
to that code, and a CVS client has some way to talk to that.

	We are primarily interested in local repo access, and remote
"pserver" access. 


What is version control?

	The idea behind is version control is that you initially
check in a sets of files, and then as you change those files over time,
you "check in" changes to the files. If at some point in time, you
need to get an older version of a file, you can "revert" your current
version to an older version. 
	
	The greatest benefit for CVS usage currently is the distributed
nature of it. A single server can keep the main tree, and individual
developers can all have slightly different versions in their local
trees. 

	Another advantage is that instead of having to download an
entire tarball or even a single file, you just need to download
the changes. The CVS client software can merge them automatically.


Why do we care?

	Lots of Open Source projects have moved to doing all of their
development from a central CVS repo. This allows for much faster integration
of changes, and all developers can have "up to the minute" versions
of the project they are working on. 

	Also, it is a very useful tool for use in revision control for
documents and web sites and similar situations.