Tagging is very important, as it is through tagging that
you create branches, and mark certain sets of files as a
set, so that they can be recovered as a set in future. The
current tagging policy is at
<http://wiki.starlink.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Starlink/CvsTagging>.
You make a tag with the cvs tag command, while
you are in a directory with a part of the repository checked
out:
This applies the tag to the repository versions indicated by the files in the current directory. In the most common case, you have just finished preparing the set of files for a release, so all the files in the directory are as you want them to be, and committed. There's a slight trap here: if there are any files which are not committed, then it is the repository version which corresponds to the modified file which is tagged, not the modified file itself (this is never useful; it is simply a warning to use thecvs tag <tag-name>
tag command only in a
fully-committed directory). If you tag a set of files which
are on a branch, then it is (probably unsurprisingly) the
branched files which are tagged.There is also a cvs rtag command which is
similar, but operates only on the repository. You won't
need to use rtag; don't confuse the two.