C.2 The cvswrappers file

Wrappers refers to a CVS feature which lets you control certain settings based on the name of the file which is being operated on. The settings are ‘-k’ for binary files, and ‘-m’ for nonmergeable text files.

The ‘-m’ option specifies the merge methodology that should be used when a non-binary file is updated. MERGE means the usual CVS behavior: try to merge the files. COPY means that cvs update will refuse to merge files, as it also does for files specified as binary with ‘-kb’ (but if the file is specified as binary, there is no need to specify ‘-m 'COPY'’). CVS will provide the user with the two versions of the files, and require the user using mechanisms outside CVS, to insert any necessary changes.

WARNING: do not use COPY with CVS 1.9 or earlier - such versions of CVS will copy one version of your file over the other, wiping out the previous contents. The ‘-m’ wrapper option only affects behavior when merging is done on update; it does not affect how files are stored. See Handling binary files, for more on binary files.

The basic format of the file ‘cvswrappers’ is:

wildcard     [option value][option value]...

where option is one of
-m           update methodology      value: MERGE or COPY
-k           keyword expansion       value: expansion mode

and value is a single-quote delimited value.

For example, the following command imports a directory, treating files whose name ends in ‘.exe’ as binary:

cvs import -I ! -W "*.exe -k 'b'" first-dir vendortag reltag