Teaching students to use CVS
Hi everyone, I'm a little more than 1/4 of the way through my Intro. to Comp. Prog. class and we're starting to get into slightly more complicated assignments. (Well maybe we're not quite there yet.) Anyway, I'd like to have a way for my programming teams to collaborate on their code. Has anyone tried teaching beginning comp. prog. students to use CVS? It would be easy enough to drag out an old server and set it up for this purpose. Any hints or experiences that anyone would share? -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Timothy Wilson wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm a little more than 1/4 of the way through my Intro. to Comp. Prog. class and we're starting to get into slightly more complicated assignments. (Well maybe we're not quite there yet.)
Anyway, I'd like to have a way for my programming teams to collaborate on their code. Has anyone tried teaching beginning comp. prog. students to use CVS? It would be easy enough to drag out an old server and set it up for this purpose.
Any hints or experiences that anyone would share?
Dave Beazley, author of Python Essential Reference and University of Chicago Assistant Professor, uses CVS for most of his advanced-level undergraduate courses. It's worked out pretty well. His course material is available from his website, http://systems.cs.uchicago.edu/~beazley/, including a quick overview of CVS. Basically he gives students the common syntaxes, and sends them to the manpages for more. But nearly all of the courses in that department are "read the manpage or fail" classes. If you're using Windoze, WinCVS may be an option -- it's not too complicated to learn, and saves a lot on all that syntax you need for the UNIX 'cvs' command. Dustin -- Dustin Mitchell dustin@cs.uchicago.edu dustin@ywlcs.org
Hi Tim, I haven't tried teaching CVS to students, just co-workers, but when I discovered it my first thoughts were, "I wish someone had showed me this in school, it would have saved me a LOT of time and trouble." Too many times of overwriting my working version in the heat of coding, or accidently deleting the work I'd struggled so long with because I was too tired to know what I was doing. I would often save everything into a dated directory, but there was no context to it, so if I did have to go back to an older version (assuming I'd saved the one I ended up needing, which was rare), I had few clues to which one. CVS has its faults, but it's orders of magnitude better than not using any revision system at all. And after struggling with the idiosyncracies of SourceSafe I liked CVS even more %-) So, no real tips, but I think it's a great idea. --Dethe -- Dethe Elza (delza@burningtiger.com) Chief Mad Scientist Burning Tiger Technologies (http://burningtiger.com) Living Code Weblog (http://livingcode.ca)
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Dethe Elza wrote:
I haven't tried teaching CVS to students, just co-workers, but when I discovered it my first thoughts were, "I wish someone had showed me this in school, it would have saved me a LOT of time and trouble."
Well I think CVS is probably overkill at this stage, but I thought I could teach it to them now so when we get to more complicated projects (/me crosses fingers <blatant Americanism probably...sorry>) they would be comfortable with the idea. I was reminding them today how I hoped that they would learn good development practices and not just Python syntax. I think getting a handle on CVS would qualify. :-) -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com
participants (3)
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Dethe Elza -
Dustin Mitchell -
Timothy Wilson