Today I found myself needing to run ahead of the current stream of development and code some things to be merged in later.  I needed the flexibility of easy branching and merging atop a code base that’s maintained in CVS.   CVS branches are overkill and Eclipse/CVS change set grouping is too limited.  What I really wanted was Git, but migrating wasn’t an option, and doing a full git cvsimport would take forever.  I just needed simple local changesets atop the shared CVS repository.

Fortunately, I stumbled across a simple workflow by Kris Johnson that met my needs perfectly.  I used it with a few minor variations, such as synching (cvs update) differently, using TortoiseCVS for a few operations, and doing the final commit via Eclipse (so that I could get one last look at the changes in the Synchronize view).  But it’s a very helpful process that I’ll hang on to.

While I’m jotting things down, here’s the .gitignore I created for the Eclipse/Java projects I’m working on.

CVS/

bin/
*.class
*.jar
*.zip

*.~
*.dat
*.cache
*.lock
*.log
*.out
*.swp