Information yet to be written on WikkiTikkiTavi CVS (Information written follows):

Web Browser Access

You can browse the TaviCVS repository, as well as all of the files in the repository, from the web. From it, you can view version and date information on the files, CVS changelogs, past versions of the files, and diffs between versions of the files.

The URL for browsing the CVS Repository is: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=21098

Anonymous CVS access (this is how you get a copy of the latest development code)

If you'd like to check out a copy of the 'Tavi code from anonymous CVS, you can do it easily with the following commands. For developers with CVS commit access, I've included information on checking out code to work with below, too. (CVS provides numerous command aliases. For example, 'co' is the short form of 'checkout', and is used frequently on this page.)

When you are prompted for a password, hit enter, leaving it blank.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tavi login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tavi co tavi

Alternately, you can achieve the same thing (assuming bash) with:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tavi
cvs login
cvs co tavi

Read/Write CVS access

You must be an "official" 'Tavi developer to access CVS this way)

For developers, use the following, replacing USERNAME with your SourceForge username. Your password will either be your SourceForge account password, or a SSH RSA key, if you've set that up.

export CVS_RSH=ssh
cvs -d:ext:USERNAME@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/tavi co tavi

You will then have a working checked out copy of the 'Tavi repository.

How to get a different CVS branch

If for some reason you ever want to retrieve a copy of a different branch from the main development branch (MAIN), for example the 0.20 release, without any updates that might happen to it, you can do so by passing co (checkout) the -r option, and supplying the release-0_20 tag.

For example: cvs co -r release-0_20 tavi

CVS configuration

There are numerous options available for many CVS commands. Some of these options are very common, and you end up typing them in nearly every time. If you'd like to avoid that, you can create a .cvsrc file. This file goes in your $HOME directory. I've included a sample (my .cvsrc) here to illustrate some options that many people place in their .cvsrc files.

$HOME/.cvsrc

cvs -z3
update -d -P
checkout -P
diff -Nau

These options turn on moderate compression for all network communication, tell update to update directories, including pruning directories that are no longer needed, and tell diff to use the unified format, include information on adding/removing files and directories, and to treat all files as text.

NOTE: Please remember to always run cvs update from within your checked out tree to ensure that you have a fully up to date version *before* creating a patch or checking in any files.

Until this gets more fleshed out, another good source of information is SquirrelMail:HowToUseDeveloperCVS?.

Oooh! Nice link. I think I may have to borrow half of their links and a few of their pointers. ;-)

-- ChristopherCashell

SourceForge has also written some excellent [CVS documentation], which is worthwhile to read if going to use CVS. They provide both information on which commands to use as enduser or developer, and they also have a [section] on different CVS clients. (On windows I prefer WinCvs?). --EvenHolen