Using the read only public CVS

This document describes how to use the read only public CVS to check out your own copy of the Zope sources.

The read-only access is based on the CVS pserver mode. To use it you will need to be running version 1.9 or better of CVS. For leads on CVS distributions for all prevalent platforms, and executables for Win 32 systems, see Cyclic's web pages.

Currently only the Zope archive and our CVS administrative files are available. We'll use the Zope archive for our example. To obtain only the digicool CVS administrative files, substitute CVSROOT for Zope2 in the cvs check out command, below.

The first thing you need to do is log into the remote CVS server. To do this, got to the directory where you want to situate the check out and execute one of the following login commands - it will prompt you for a password. (On my windows system i needed to maintain a setting for _CVS_PASSFILE_, to something like c:\cvspass, for the login to work.) Here's the command:

    % cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository login

(The -d option identifies the repository, indicating pserver mode, user anonymous, host cvs.zope.org, and directory /cvs-repository.)

You should be prompted for a password - for the Zope2 and CVSROOT repositories, the password is anonymous.

You only need to log in once - it causes a file named .cvspass to be created in your home directory, with a (crudely) encoded version of the password associated with the server. Subsequently the password will be sought from this file, so you don't need to worry about it unless the file gets clobbered.

Once your login is established, you can do your initial check out:

    % cvs -z7 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository checkout Zope2

(-z7 says to use a substantial level of compression, balancing CPU and network bandwidth.)

This should issue lots and lots of check out messages, creating a directory named Zope2, with the entire distribution inside it. The initial checkout creates a copy of the source files together with some CVS bookkeeping (in directories all named CVS) which keeps track of the repository and login information. You shouldn't need to repeat the checkout except for certain occasions when a new module has been added to the repository. In such cases, redoing the checkout will add in the new content without distubing what's already been obtained.

Once you've done these initial steps, you can stay current by cd'ing into any of the created Zope subdirectories and typing:

    % cvs -z7 -q up -P -d

(-q says not to spew about unchanged files, -P says to prune empty (eg, obsolete) directories, and -d says to check out newly added directories.)

Norman Vine offers a procedure he uses to do the checkout under windows.

We're in the early stages, and expect to be adding to the selection of projects and also the support for checking them out. In the meanwhile, if you have any questions, please either send them to the digicool-cvs@zope.org mailing list, or directly to me, klm@digicool.com , if you'd prefer a less public forum. Feedback is welcome!

Created by Brian. Last modified on 2000/07/06.