Telling CVS to notify you
-------------------------

   You can tell CVS that you want to receive notifications about
various actions taken on a file.  You can do this without using `cvs
watch on' for the file, but generally you will want to use `cvs watch
on', so that developers use the `cvs edit' command.

 - Command: cvs watch add [`-a' ACTION] [`-lR'] FILES ...
     Add the current user to the list of people to receive notification
     of work done on FILES.

     The `-a' option specifies what kinds of events CVS should notify
     the user about.  ACTION is one of the following:

    `edit'
          Another user has applied the `cvs edit' command (described
          below) to a file.

    `unedit'
          Another user has applied the `cvs unedit' command (described
          below) or the `cvs release' command to a file, or has deleted
          the file and allowed `cvs update' to recreate it.

    `commit'
          Another user has committed changes to a file.

    `all'
          All of the above.

    `none'
          None of the above.  (This is useful with `cvs edit',
          described below.)

     The `-a' option may appear more than once, or not at all.  If
     omitted, the action defaults to `all'.

     The FILES and options are processed as for the `cvs watch'
     commands.


 - Command: cvs watch remove [`-a' ACTION] [`-lR'] FILES ...
     Remove a notification request established using `cvs watch add';
     the arguments are the same.  If the `-a' option is present, only
     watches for the specified actions are removed.


   When the conditions exist for notification, CVS calls the `notify'
administrative file.  Edit `notify' as one edits the other
administrative files (see Intro administrative files.).  This file
follows the usual conventions for administrative files (
see syntax.), where each line is a regular expression followed by a
command to execute.  The command should contain a single ocurrence of
`%s' which will be replaced by the user to notify; the rest of the
information regarding the notification will be supplied to the command
on standard input.  The standard thing to put in the `notify' file is
the single line:

     ALL mail %s -s \"CVS notification\"

   This causes users to be notified by electronic mail.

   Note that if you set this up in the straightforward way, users
receive notifications on the server machine.  One could of course write
a `notify' script which directed notifications elsewhere, but to make
this easy, CVS allows you to associate a notification address for each
user.  To do so create a file `users' in `CVSROOT' with a line for each
user in the format USER:VALUE.  Then instead of passing the name of the
user to be notified to `notify', CVS will pass the VALUE (normally an
email address on some other machine).

   CVS does not notify you for your own changes.  Currently this check
is done based on whether the user name of the person taking the action
which triggers notification matches the user name of the person getting
notification.  In fact, in general, the watches features only track one
edit by each user.  It probably would be more useful if watches tracked
each working directory separately, so this behavior might be worth
changing.