The development of a product is usually performed by several software engineers. Version control systems such as CVS are typically used to manage the files related to the development. Although version control systems are generally applied on programming projects, they are not limited to that purpose and can be used for any task that involves the management of datafiles.
CVS is based on the concept of branches, where each developer can commit his modifications to the same set of resources. The main branch, HEAD, is generally used when there is a certainty that the implementation is stable. It is possible to use several branches and merge the files to the main branch at any moment.
CVS repositories maintain a history of every committed change made to the resources over time. A resource may be compared with or replaced with any prior existing revision.
Eclipse provides facilities for merging, committing, and accessing a project's history. In the following sections, we'll present some of the...