As we've seen earlier, "cvs update" will bring your sources up-to-date with the current version in the repository -- but what happens to the changes you've made? Don't worry, they aren't thrown away. If another developer made changes to a file that you haven't touched, your local file will be updated so that it's in-sync with the version on the repository.

And, if you modified lines 1-10 of a local file, and another developer deleted lines 40-50, added 12 new lines at the end of the file, modified lines 30-40 and then committed his changes to the repository before you, cvs will intelligently merge these changes into your locally modified copy so that none of your changes are lost. This allows two or more developers to work on different parts of the same file at the same time.