Re: sharing single files within project

[Stephen Cardie]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 02:23 -0400, Carsten Schaudel wrote:
> Hello together !
>  [cut]
> One lack found there was that it seems that it is only possible to share 
> whole folders among multiple projects, but not single files. Does CVS 
> support this ? (It is hard to believe that VSS supports something which CVS 
> and SVN don't).
> 

Carsten,

CVS can do this via module aliases.

This is best explained with an example: say you are starting work on
'big_project', which consists of two modules: big_project_client and
big_project_server.  You wish to include a couple of useful Perl modules
from the in-house utilites module.  Here's one approach:

First, checkout your repository's 'modules' file:

cvs co CVSROOT/modules

Create some aliases in this file for 'big_project':

# Create a module alias for the perl modules we need
# Alias name    module to use         files to extract
perl_modules    utilities/perl/lib    Module1.pm Module2.pm
#
# Create an alias for big_project, using "ampersand aliases"
big_project     &big_project_client &big_project_server &perl_modules

Commit this back to your repository.

Now when we checkout big_project, we get the following directory
structure:

big_project/big_project_client
big_project/big_project_server
big_project/perl_modules

and big_project/perl_modules will contain
big_project/perl_modules/utilities/perl/lib/Module1.pm
big_project/perl_modules/utilities/perl/lib/Module2.pm

The Cederqvist manual has more on module aliases at:
http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/cvsmanual/Aliasmodules.html

Cheers,

Steve