CVS

From Freeciv

CVS is Concurrent Version System, a source code management tool. Anyone can check out versions of the Freeciv code base and modify(patch) them. A patch can be submitted for inclusion into CVS; the Freeciv maintainers will (attempt to) honor this on patches that are considered important and mature enough. Some patches achieve this instantly - usually when they take only a couple of lines and clearly do not affect what is going on anywhere else in the code - while many other patches never make it to this stage - usually when they're big or when it's not very clear whether it is really important to have the feature(s) they implement.

A chain of subsequent versions in CVS (resulting from subsequent application of patches) is called a branch. A stable Freeciv release can always be found as a version in CVS on a "stable" branch - which means that patches applied to that branch have the purpose of fixing bugs and reducing the amount of testing that still needs to be done. Meanwhile, "wilder" developments go on in the "unstable" branch. The "unstable" branch is always the basis for the next release. The main "unstable" branch is refered to as CVS HEAD.

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You probably want to use this to get hold of the latest development code. If you're downloading a source release (like 2.0.1) you don't need it. The daily snapshots provide a snapshot of the development release but with CVS it will be easier to update your downloaded version (CVS automatically updates you to the latest code).

In Unix systems cvs will already be installed, or will be in a package called 'cvs'. On MS Windows there are several graphical CVS client programs (TortoiseCVS is the recommended one)).

See How to Contribute.