Starting from version 1.9, MacCVSClient supports the CVS team collaboration features Edit, Watch and friends.

CVS supports team collaboration and work synchronisation in two ways:

1. traditional file content centered commands (commit, update, diff, etc.)
2. collaboration centered commands (edit, watch, etc.).

The commands "Sandbox/Edit", "Sandbox/Unedit" (indirectly also "Sandbox/Commit...") are used to flag files in the repository as being edited (or to un-flag them again). If one user runs a "Sandbox/Edit" on a file in her sandbox, this is recorded in the CVS repository. Other users can user the "Sandbox/Editors" command to retrieve information from the repository regarding who is currently editing files.

The "Sandbox/Watch" command is used to enable automatic notification upon "Sandbox/Edit" and "Sandbox/Unedit" commands. Moreover, "Sandobox/Watch" is used to enable read-only check-outs of files.

When read-only check-outs are used, the "Sandbox/Edit" command — in addition to the above — makes the selected files writable. This way, the read-only status of files reminds you to "Sandbox/Edit" a file before actually starting to modify it.

Detailes and explanations regarding the Edit and Watch mechanisms in CVS can be found in the standard CVS documentation: Cederqvist, section 10.6, "Mechanisms to track who is editing files".

If you want to know which files are edited by whom, the "Sandbox/Editors" command will retrieve the information from the server. Command "Sandbox/Watchers" will tell who has registered as a watcher for a file.

To retrieve all Edit and Watch related information plus general status information in one go, the "Sandbox/Get Info" command can be used. It is equivalent to running the commands

• "Sandbox/Editors",
• "Sandbox/Watchers" and
• "Sandbox/Status"

command one after the other.

The information retrieved from the server as described above is cashed until the the sandbox folder is closed in MacCVSClient.

In addition to the basic editors and watchers markers in the flags column of the Sandbox Window (flags E, e, W and w), the Sandbox Inspector window displays detailed watchers and editors information.

The Sandbox Inspector window has three panes accessible through a tabbed interface:

General

Shows file access rights, type and creator codes and the short (abbreviated) file name of a file that has a name longer than 31 characters.

Editors

Shows detailed editors information.

Watchers

Shows detailed watchers information.

The current CVS server implementation supports only one single sandbox per developer for the Edit and Watch mechanisms. This means that if you run have two different sandboxes A and B checked out and run a "Sandbox/Edit" for a file F first in sandbox A and then for the same file F in sandbox B, the information that you ran a "Sandbox/Edit" on F in A will be lost once you run a "Sandbox/Edit" on F in B.

The above restriction is due to the CVS server implementation (at least up to CVS server versions 1.10) and there is no way MacCVSClient (or other clients for that matter) can circumvent this problem.