13.1 Importing for the first time

Use the import command to check in the sources for the first time. When you use the import command to track third-party sources, the vendor tag and release tags are useful. The vendor tag is a symbolic name for the branch (which is always 1.1.1, unless you use the ‘-b branch’ flag—see Multiple vendor branches.). The release tags are symbolic names for a particular release, such as ‘FSF_0_04’.

Note that import does not change the directory in which you invoke it. In particular, it does not set up that directory as a CVS working directory; if you want to work with the sources import them first and then check them out into a different directory (see section Getting the source).

Suppose you have the sources to a program called wdiff in a directory ‘wdiff-0.04’, and are going to make private modifications that you want to be able to use even when new releases are made in the future. You start by importing the source to your repository:

$ cd wdiff-0.04
$ cvs import -m "Import of FSF v. 0.04" fsf/wdiff FSF_DIST WDIFF_0_04

The vendor tag is named ‘FSF_DIST’ in the above example, and the only release tag assigned is ‘WDIFF_0_04’.