vendor/local files in CVS

[Bob Fyfe]

Well, I've searched the archives and FAQ as best I can and while I 
have seen threads similar to the information for which I'm looking, 
I did not see exactly this...

I've used CVS over the last year to my own satisfaction...no expert 
but useful to me. Our organization now has a new project on the 
horizon and I've been asked to provide my instilled wisdom (sic). 
Here's the deal:

We receive source code from a vendor which consists of many files 
(call it version 1). That source code requires running a 'make' to 
set up the environment from the tar file they distribute. 
Subsequently, several files have been changed. Additionally, several 
files have been created.  So at this point you have "vendor" source 
files and several "localized" files (i.e. vendor files modified and 
new locally created files).  This would be an easy scenario to put 
things into CVS - you could just put all of it, vendor and locally 
modified files there.  The problem I am trying to conceptualize 
before it happens is when the vendor provides a new release with new 
vendor source files and new versions of the locally modified set of 
files.  I know you can do a merge but I still envision that just in 
the vendor code - forget about any local modifications or additions - 
there could be many changes to existing files that were never touched 
locally or even additions of files. I don't think that we would 
necessarily want to track or reconcile these changes.  I would think 
that we would be most interested in tracking changes between a file 
that is given to us and the modifications we've made to it. That is 
the type of file I would expect you would want to merge.

So the question at hand is, do you put everything into CVS and tag it 
as a version (say, version 1 for the first vendor set, version 1a for 
our locally modified version which would include the vendor files and 
our changes/additions). After that when we get a new vendor set of 
files I'm lost what to do.

Am I trying to make CVS do something it's not made to do???

Thanks for any help.

bob

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*Bob Fyfe,      KG8FU,  NREMT-P "A King's Kid" John 1.12      *
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