where can i learn how to use CVS?

With your cvs package there should come the info-Pages for cvs which are quite informative and a great reference. As is the pocketreference sold by O'Reilly. But I can offer you another quite intersting link: The CVS-Book available at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ - some distribution have this available as a package so you can read it offline, too.

This different offers should be able to answer all your general questions. Try a little around with a local test repository and get used to it. If you have more special problems don't hesitate to write them down.

thanks! to think i was considering buying that book.

i'll go look at those references.

http://www.cvshome.org/ is also quite good.

--jeremy

thanks! i bookmarked that site too. will check it out as well.

one more question:
where can i learn how to write configure scripts?
as in, after we download tarballs, we have to run the command "./configure" to check if certain pre-requisites are present etc etc. is there an online resource somewhere i can look to?

thanks in advance.

i don't think anyone knows how to write configure scripts. i just let a standard IDE like anjuta write them for me. I presume they just get them from a standard repository somewhere too. incidentally, there's a good online book about gnome that has a fair bit about that kind of thing, search for GGAD 'Gnome something Application Development', i think it's on developer.gnome.org and is a farily chunky read, my printed out for free version is about an inch thick...

oof!
hehe, hunger drives the needy.
in ideal circumstances, i would have preferred a master-apprentice kind of environment to learn programming. however, i've yet to meet someone with that kind of generosity and time to spare for me. so reading thick incomprehensible tomes is the only way for me now... lol!

btw, anjuta is only for the gnome?

I purchased the O'reilly CVS pocket reference book and quite frankly it is useless. You can't go wrong with the documentation that comes with the package.

I also found an extremely useful FAQ that gave me so many different ideas and routes it solved nearly all my problems with branches and vendor imports in one go.

You can find it here:-

http://www.cs.utah.edu/csinfo/texinfo/cvs/FAQ.txt

thanks!