How to set up a complex project

[Fran Fabrizio]

Hello,

Until now I've only used CVS to set up relatively simple projects, and
now I'm needing to do something a little more complicated.  I have a lot
of questions about how to properly leverage CVS in this situation.  The
situation is as follows:

We're working with uClinux.  We have need to customize some of the stuff
for our purposes and would like to keep our changes in CVS.  uClinux is
distributed as a big tarball which, from what I can tell, is mostly
source code with maybe a few binary files (definitely saw some .gif and
.jpg, not sure if there were any compiled libraries or 3rd-party
software in there as well).  It's pretty big, a 32 meg gzipped tarball.

So, I was wondering, if we were to use their latest tarball as the base
of our CVS (first question: will there be a problem having a CVS project
that large?) and then edit and check in our changes off of that, I think
that would work, with a few questions.

- What happens when they release a new tarball?  We've already made
changes to some of their stuff so do I create a new vendor branch, put
their new stuff on it, and then merge the branches?

- Is there any way to check in the whole project at once if there are
binary files in it?

- Will I have to change all of the 100+ (rough estimate) Makefiles so
that they compile somewhere else instead of right there in the working
directory?

- Is this feasible at all or am I going about this all wrong?

I'm sure a lot of these are just newbie questions that expose my total
lack of understanding regarding managing large, open source projects
like this. =)  So if someone could shine some light on this subject for
me, it'd be greatly appreciated!  Thanks.

-Fran