Appendix C. Concurrent Version System (CVS)

The LDP provides optional CVS access to its authors. This enables collaborative writing and has the following positive effects:

1. CVS will keep an off-site backup of your documents. In the event that you hand over a document to another author, they can just retrieve the document from CVS and continue on. In the event you need to go back to a previous version of a document, you can retrieve it as well.

2. However difficult from an organizational point of view, it's great to have multiple people working on the same document. CVS enables you to do this. You can have CVS tell you what changes were made by another author while you were editing your copy, and integrate those changes.

3. CVS keeps a log of what changes were made. These logs (and a date stamp) can be placed automatically inside your documents when they are published.

4. CVS can be combined with scripts to automatically update the LDP web site with new documentation as it's written and submitted. This is not in place yet, but it is a goal. Currently, CVS updates signal the HOWTO coordinator to update the LDP web page, meaning that if you use CVS, you're not required to e-mail your XML code. (Although you do still need to send the submit list an email when you are ready for your document to be published, because the whole publishing process has not been fully automated yet.)

	Access to our CVS repository
	Only authors with at least three submissions get access to our CVS, see Appendix C.

You can browse the LDP CVS repository via the web at http://cvsview.tldp.org/.