[drupal-devel] Beginner using Tortoise CVS seeks help!

[Angie Byron]

DISCLAIMER: I've only been at this a couple months myself, but here's my 
understanding of how it works. Anyone else, feel free to correct me. :)

Joel Guesclin wrote:
<snip>
> 1) My success with Tortoise so far has downloaded to
> my workstation what looks like the ENTIRE Drupal CVS.
> Apparently I could update anything in this - that
> makes me very nervous that I might mess up someone
> else's work, or Drupal core worse still. Is there any
> way to avoid this?

There are two repositories:

- drupal: the Drupal core files--only Dries and a couple other people have write 
access to this, but anyone can do an anonymous checkout.

- contributions: which contains any user-contributed stuff (themes, modules, 
translations, etc.). Changes you make here can indeed affect anything in this 
repository, but will not affect Drupal core files.

To avoid writing over others' changes (something I've accidentally done myself 
:\), there are two things you should do:

1. Always perform an Update (right-click, CVS Update) prior to committing any 
changes. This way you can make sure your files are up-to-date and can tell ahead 
of time if there are any conflicts.
2. Highlight only the specific file(s) you are changing before committing 
(ctrl+click to highlight specific files, then right-click, CVS Commit).

> 2) Do I need to keep all these directories on my
> workstation for the CVS to work?

No, just the directory your module is in (checkout).

> 3) Is there anywhere some documentation for helping a
> Tortoise user with Drupal to get started?

I wrote up some awhile back in my SoC blog here: http://www.planetsoc.com/node/90.

Let me know if you find it at all helpful, and I can maybe clean it up some and 
make a handbook page out of it.

> 4) I seem to have managed to create a "Checkout"
> module (tomorrow I will try to create the project
> under Drupal) in the CVS, with all the appropriate
> files - not sure that I understand tagging and
> branching yet, so will have to see if it works. But
> every time I load a file to the CVS server I get this
> message in the Tortoise window:
> initial revision: 1.1
> cvs commit: Using deprecated info format strings. 
> Convert your scripts to use
> the new argument format and remove '1's from your info
> file format strings.
> 
> Do I need to worry about this?

No. Though I've not managed to find a definitive reason as to why it does this, 
the responses I received when I asked that question were along the lines of, 
"Because CVS sucks." ;) So you should be ok to ignore it.