[thelist] Using CVS for team web dev

[Matt Warden]

thelist,

Here's the situation:

We have 4 people working on a web-based application in PHP that is
hosted on a remote server. The project is such that it is very far
from ideal to need to keep a local copy of the application in order to
develop and test. I have set up CVS so that we hopefully do not write
over each others' work, and if someone misunderstands how something
works and messes it up, we can roll-back to a working version.

I have not used CVS before, and I have not used an application for
source control for web development before (I had always been the sole
developer and did my own primitive source control). CVS doesn't really
work like I was expecting.

So, CVS lives on a remote development server. I want to be able to do
local editing, and then upload to the development server for testing.
However, if I don't use CVS for this testing portion, then I risk
overwriting someone else's work (again, because it is not very
feasible to keep copies of this application, so we would be testing on
the same copy). The way I guess it is might work in this type of
situation is:

1. check in the file remotely.
2. ssh to server, cd to dev directory.
3. check out the file from CVS to this directory.
4. Test the file.

However, that is too complicated, and the other developers on the team
will never do it (even if they *want* to remember to do it, surely
there will be times when they forget). I wanted to make CVS a required
step in the upload process, such that checking in the file was the
same as uploadign it to the development server. I tried fooling with
getting the webserver to serve files out of the repository, but
obviously this does not work. So, to summarize, I was hoping to do
this:

1. check in the file remotely (this effectively uploads the file to
the development server)
2. Test the file
3. wash, rinse, repeat

That way there is very little deviation from a typical development process.

Does anyone have experience with this? Am I missing something
fundamental in my understanding of how CVS is supposed to work in a
development process? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks all,

-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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