Hi,
I work as part of a team developing software. Our work is mostly separate, with some overlap so a shared filesystem is fine. But at the moment we are working on a BIG project together, and it has gone past the point of all working on the same files!

CVS seems an ideal solution, and i've set it up.

But, i'm not sure how to work with our current project as it has a base (which almost all work is done on) and some customisations for each specific installation. These customisations include extra files (images, html,etc), different java files, etc.

We have a file structure:

.
./common/ (all files common to all implementations)
./common/src/ (all java source)
./common/jsps/ (all jsps)
etc...
./specific/company1/
./specific/company1/src (java src for co1 - only extra or files to overwrite)
./speicifc/company2/
etc...
./builds/company1/
./builds/company2/
etc..
./builds/common/


Ant is then used to build - it compiles common/src into builds/common/classes, builds/company1/classes, builds/company2/classes, etc, then compiles specific/DIR/* to builds/DIR/*
It then copies common/* (excl java files) to the build folders, and then copies ./common/DIR/* (excl java files) to ./builds/DIR/*.

I think i am going to use cvs to give better simultaneous access to files, and to allow versioning. My question is, should i just use cvs to dump all the 'specific' files up there as they are at the moment, is is there a better way to do it - ie here is the base, and here are the extras for c1, c2, etc?

Thanks,
Daniel.

I am not a specialist on versioning systems, but I guess that the former idea is better than the later one. By the way, an interesting versioning-system project is subversion. It's said to be the evolution of CVS. Actually, it's developed by the very same people who developed CVS. Provisions have been taken to ensure it has the CVS-like interaction-style with enhanced functionality and many new features. Maybe you can find in it a feature that better suits your needs in new ways. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Disruptor

Well, i think after trialing stuff that my answer is cvs.
It provides the versioning history we need, and sharing of the files in a more robust manner.

I think it will be ok to keep the same project structure as before to deal with the sub projects.

What would be nice was to be able to build the repository on a regular basis and dump it to tomcat... (another post for that one)

Oh yeah, another reason i dont want to use a different versioning system is that Eclipse supports cvs. As i mainly use eclipse this is v. useful!