Re: Sharing files among projects

[Gary Granger]

I have found that it is ok to symlink *directories* in the CVS repository,
but you should not symlink individual files.  CVS uses locks on a
per-directory basis to handle concurrency, and linking a file across
directories allows multiple cvs processes to access the file simultaneously
and possibly corrupt it.

However, symlinked directories are not supported by CVS by design (as far
as I know), so it is possible that future implementations might break
symlinked directories.  (For example, locking per file or directory
versioning might break it.) I would suggest trying the "master checkout" or
"golden tree" approach, where one copy of a project is always kept checked
out, usually read-only, from which other working directories or subsets of
other projects can include header files, link to libraries, and share build
configuration without needing their own full checkout of the project.

There may also be a way to solve this using cvs modules, but I don't know
enough about that part of CVS to say.

gary