CVS (was Re: Speak Freely and Reflector)

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

OK, here's a very brief introduction to downloading with CVS.  there are
more complete docs out there and if you're at all interested, please read
them.

You can use an environment variable, I think it's CVSROOT, to specify the
server and path of the CVS repository.  Since I don't use this, I won't
talk about it

The rough form of CVS commmands is as follows:

cvs <options> <command> <options>

CVS has a lot of commands and options that I don't know about, so I'll only
give the examples you need to download from the speakup CVS repository.
The first thing you need to type is:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous at linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS login

There are a couple of things to note.  firstly, notice the colon between
org and /usr.  That does need to be there.  Secondly, the cvs in
/usr/src/CVS is in caps.

If all goes well, you will be prompted for a password.  Type in please (all
lower case) and hit enter.  You should return to your shell prompt.

Now, you are in a position to download or, to use the CVS term, checkout
modules.  A module is simply a project in the CVS repository.  When you
check out a module, a subdirectory wil be created with that module in it so
make sure you're where you want to be before you do a checkout.

I'm guessing you're interested in the speak freely CVS code.  To get that,
do the following:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous at linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS co speak_freely

After it does its thing, you'll have a subdirectory called speak_freely
with the speak freely CVS source code.  change into that subdir and do what
you're told to get it to compile.  Note that many packages in CVS
repositories have additional or supplimentory commands that need to be run
on CVS source trees that do not need to be run on release tarballs, so
check any documentation there might be.  Speak freely is, however, not one
of these.

Now, you've done the hard part.  You can easily update the CVS source tree
in the future, provided you've not done anything radical to the source, by
changing into the speak_freely CVS source directory and typing:

cvs update -P -d

Having said that, I'm getting "cvs [update aborted]: recv() from server
linux-speakup.org: Connection reset by peer" and I don't know why ... but
that's not meant to happen <grin>.  You don't need to specify the server or
password, as these are remembered by CVS and the files it stores.

One other note about the speakup CVS server.  linux-speakup.org (a.k.a.
bumpy.braille.uwo.ca) is set to reject anyone who's IP address does not
reverse lookup to match their hostname.  some ISPs out there do not provide
reverse lookups for their IP addresses (i.e. you cannot lookup a user's
host name from their IP address - nothing is returned).  If your ISP does
this, sorry, you're out of luck.  Get some nice friend to snag it
and tar it up for you.  Them's the breaks.

Hope this helps.

Geoff.