4.3 Assigning revisions

By default, CVS will assign numeric revisions by leaving the first number the same and incrementing the second number. For example, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.

When adding a new file, the second number will always be one and the first number will equal the highest first number of any file in that directory. For example, the current directory contains files whose highest numbered revisions are 1.7, 3.1, and 4.12, then an added file will be given the numeric revision 4.1. (When using client/server CVS, only files that are actually sent to the server are considered.)

Normally there is no reason to care about the revision numbers—it is easier to treat them as internal numbers that CVS maintains, and tags provide a better way to distinguish between things like release 1 versus release 2 of your product (see Tags). However, if you want to set the numeric revisions, the ‘-r’ option to cvs commit can do that. The ‘-r’ option implies the ‘-f’ option, in the sense that it causes the files to be committed even if they are not modified.

For example, to bring all your files up to revision 3.0 (including those that haven’t changed), you might invoke:

$ cvs commit -r 3.0

Note that the number you specify with ‘-r’ must be larger than any existing revision number. That is, if revision 3.0 exists, you cannot ‘cvs commit -r 1.3’. If you want to maintain several releases in parallel, you need to use a branch (see Branching and merging).