Concurrent Versions System - History and Status

History and Status

CVS developed from an earlier versioning-system called Revision Control System (RCS) (still in use) that manages individual files but not whole projects. Dick Grune provides some brief historical notes about CVS on his site. To quote:

I created CVS to be able to cooperate with my students, Erik Baalbergen and Maarten Waage, on the ACK (Amsterdam Compiler Kit) C compiler. The three of us had vastly different schedules (one student was a steady 9-5 worker, the other was irregular, and I could work on the project only in the evenings). Their project ran from July 1984 to August 1985. CVS was initially called cmt, for the obvious reason that it allowed us to commit versions independently.

— Dick Grune, Dick Grune's website

Grune publicly released the code to mod.sources on June 23, 1986: Google Groups continues to archive and serve the original usenet post.

The code that eventually evolved into the current version of CVS started with Brian Berliner in April 1989, with later input from Jeff Polk and many other contributors. Brian Berliner wrote a paper introducing his improvements to the CVS program—which describes how the tool was extended and used internally by Prisma, a third-party developer working on the SunOS kernel, and was released for the benefit of the community under the GPL. On November 19, 1990, CVS version 1.0 was submitted to the Free Software Foundation for development and distribution.

CVS introduced the implementation of branching into version control systems: the branching techniques in other systems all derive from the CVS implementation as documented in 1990. Whilst RCS did incorporate the concept of branches - they were for individual files only.

CVS has always solidly supported distributed, multi-site and offline operations due to the unreliability of the few computer networks that existed at the time CVS evolved.

Active development of CVS continues with new releases correlating directly with requests for new features or bug reports, with the latest version released May 2008, and only some maintenance bugfixes since then in the CVS project's own CVS repository. This suggests that the product is mature.

Development of the Microsoft Windows port of CVS has split off into a separate project named CVSNT and has been more active in extending the feature set of the system, even porting the changes back to the UNIX platform.