A CVS lifesaver that you can put into your shell init file: export CVS_RSH=ssh This defaults to rsh and figuring out that I had to set it like this took me

A CVS lifesaver that you can put into your shell init file: export CVS_RSH=ssh This defaults to rsh and figuring out that I had to set it like this took me a shameful amount of time (mostly because it produces such and unhelpful error message). I literally couldn't pull the OpenBSD src tree for months... I'm one of the few people who deliberately learned and used CVS (for a while) in recent times. I did not have any public repositories at the time and needed VCS for my configuration and some documents (Org mode mostly), and the model where I could have a central repository on a local directory which I could easily back up was compelling. Then I figured out a filesystem layout where I could back up all my work easily and this became useless, thus I switched to Mercurial. Nowadays I'm considering going just git, because it's what everybody uses, and Magit is a compelling piece of software. I use RCS regularly along with Mercurial and Git nowadays. RCS is good for e.g. when I have a tree where most of the content is pdf files (papers), images, and other binary data that does not really need to be version controlled, together with an Org mode files for notes. I also have a pool of Elisp files which contain the personal bits of my Emacs configuration, and I use RCS on them because their histories are not related to one another. It's no good for projects anymore because it is essentialy a tool used when people used a single computer to develop software to which they connected w/ terminals, so they were all users of the same machine and the code was always in a determined location. One thing people tend to confuse with CVS or SVN is that they think it's a client/server model whereas it's actually a repo/checkout model. The repo is central and can totally reside in a local tree, and checkins from different checkouts go directly to that repo. This is akin to sharing one .git tree between all your checkouts of a single repository.