Managing a project in multiple directories?

[google]

Hi,

The project in question does not have a single root directory. Although
the bulk of the files live in /var/www (and *only* project-related
files are in there), some critical ones live in /etc and other
directories (and in most cases there are non-project files in these
directories). Effectively, the project consists of the entire
filesystem, with huge chunks (/tmp, /dev, /bin, ...) ignored.

The question is, how to convince CVS to treat this project as a single
unit: eg when checking out, I don't want to say 'cvs checkout proj' and
have the entire project filesystem dumped into ./proj; rather the
checked out files should be created with their correct absolute paths.

I'm not entirely sure that CVS is even the right tool for this job...

Any suggestions?

Regards,

Niall