Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
Above the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A E Houseman
TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It's freely available under the GPL -
you can copy it, modify the source code, or even sell it, as long as you
make any changes to the source code available. It is heavily based on the
source code for WinCVS, a great Windows client for CVS.
DISCLAIMER: TortoiseCVS comes with no warranty. It's also quite new.
You might not want to use it with valuable data. Saying that, I use it
every day with valuable data, and have had no problems which might cause
loss of data. Most functionality uses the cvs2ntlib.dll which comes with
the latest beta of WinCVS. So if you trust the latest WinCVS, it might
be sensible to trust this.
Experience of both CVS and, for some features, WinCVS is probably necessary to make the best of TortoiseCVS at the moment.
Windows NT/95 only: You might need to install
the IE4 shell or desktop extensions to get a more recent version of
Explorer. This is only a problem on Windows NT/95. To do this install IE4, and
choose Yes to install the active desktop. Don't worry, you can turn off the
actual active desktop later by right clicking on it. It's the new version of
Explorer that we are after. If you've already installed IE5, you must
uninstall it and then install IE4 with desktop extensions, and then install IE5
again. IE5 itself doesn't come with the desktop extensions. What a
palaver.
Uninstallation: You won't be able to delete TortoiseShell.dll while
Explorer has it loaded. To uninstall, first remove the registry entries
by double clicking on Unregister.reg. Then log off and back in again, reboot, or force Explorer to
respawn itself. You can now delete the TortoiseCVS folder.
From then on you can Update, Commit, Add or perform Differences by right clicking on files and folders. You will also see the icon overlays within folders which are under CVS:
There are some more options on the CVS submenu, including Remove.
Now go and read the Guide.