Hints needed for using CVS in Quartus

There probably users using RCS, cvs, or subversion with Quartus, but there are some things about the Altera tools that aren't friendly to them. The greatest problem I've faced is that Quartus likes absolute paths, and the great thing about RCS/cvs/subversion is that you could have multiple sandbox directories going at once, all working on variants of your design.

We use multiple directories:

project/rtl

project/sim

project/impl

and a few others.

We do all simulation work outside of Quartus, with our own make files.

In our impl directory, we have a script that is invoked with quartus_sh to create a new project and set various variables for that project, such as:

set_global_assignment -name USER_LIBRARIES "$rootdir/rtl"

You can start with your existing qsf files as templates to create such a script.

SOPC builder and NIOS2 IDE can be even worse about using absolute paths.

Altera has their own solution, which is to use their archive operation in Quartus. I think it creates snapshots stored in files that you name, which might be sufficient for what you wanted, but most of us prefer the per file control of CVS et al.