Question

We are using CVS for version control and committing and fetching changes in a project.
Often we face the following problem:- CVS is integrated in Eclipse.

1. Since team is large, people often commit and don’t write comment as to who actually committed it. This creates a big problem when someone
   changes the code and the identity of that person is unknown.

Is there any way of capturing details of user who commit anything in CVS whether he wishes to tell or not. This way even if someone changes anything in repository without informing anyone the identity and change done by that person can be found out.

Answer 1

CVS records the user ID associated with each commit. Setting up users/passwords is the task of the CVS administrator. Multiple authentication schemes are possible (such as authenticating against the underlying OS, or authenticating against a file), but at the end of the day, a user has to “log in” to a CVS repository in order to be able to use it.

So, as long as your CVS administrator has set up proper authentication, each user will have their own user ID and password to log into CVS.

Try executing cvs log against a file, and you’ll see a list of revision numbers, along with details of all committers.

If your CVS repository is not set up with proper authentication, then in a way, you’re shooting yourself in the foot here. By allowing people to commit code without properly identifying themselves, you give up the possibility of… identifying committers.

If you’d like to check how your CVS server is configured security-wise, try to look at how you, yourself, are accessing your CVS server. Start by looking at the CVSROOT environment variable (if you’re working from the command line), or – if you’re working through an IDE – look at the settings of your CVS connection. I find it hard to believe that you can connect to a CVS server in your organization, without really knowing how to do it.