Use of CVS in W3C

We use CVS for editing most parts of the W3C web site. You are strongly encouraged to use it for your area, too. It provides logs, history, and handy backups for each page under its control, allows many people to maintain a shared information space using versioning control, and is supported by our JigEdit distributed authoring tool. In case of trouble, send mail to sysreq. You will likely also want to read setting up ssh for cvs.

Note: this area was until recently W3C staff-internal, and some of the links may still point to staff-internal areas. If there is some information you need that isn't accessible to you, please let us know.

Last modified $Date: 2001/06/29 08:28:35 $ by $Author: gerald $

CVS Clients

Unix

CVS is available from the GNU source archives as a command line tool

Windows NT

As of 20001020, cygwin comes with a ersion of OpenSSH (in /latest). Also, you can find a copy of cvs in the /contrib directory. Reagle has been able to get ssh-agent and ssh-add working with a bare /etc/passwd and CYGWIN="", then CVS follows.
There is also a GUI CVS version. Reagle has been told that WinCVS now works with Cygwin OpenSSH as long as the shell is in bin mode, Reagle has not been able to confirm.
Reagle's exchanged some emails with developer of Tourtise, which is a slick explorer extension that uses Cygwin code about working with the cygwin tools.

Mac

MacCVS Pro (free/GPL'd)
list of Mac version control software/systems

Emacs

2 options:

They're a limited built in Version Control (for CVS, RCS and SCCS) system within emacs so for the basics there's no reason to leave emacs for the command prompt. Look under Tools menu, then Version Control or M-x vc- and then tab complete to see the options.
Far better for CVS specific is the capabilities of pcl-cvs mode.
Source is at ftp://rum.cs.yale.edu/pub/monnier/pcl-cvs/ **you also need the elib package there
local pcl-cvs user docs and installation instructions
this can be a pain to setup, send me a note or find me on irc if you want help ted@w3.org

Repositories and Servers at W3C

We currenty have three CVS repositories:

Public remote CVS repository

Public remote CVS Repository

This is the repository for all our Open Source software and can be accessed through our cvsweb interface.

For write access, this CVS repository is accessed through SSH:

CVSROOT=dev.w3.org:/sources/public

CVS_RSH=ssh

It also offers anonymous read-only access to the public, using pserver authentication; see the public home for more info.

Quick Start / Examples

@@ needs more work

You create your local work area by doing an update operation. For example, if you are going to work in the HTTP-NG area then you type the following to create a local copy in your home directory:

        cd
        cvs update -d WWW/Protocols/HTTP-NG/

From now on, you work in this local area and do a CVS commit whenever you want to commit some changes. In order to make the changes appear on our Web site, you also need to update the checked out version on AFS. For example,

        cd HTTP-NG
        cvs update

Historical Interest

Here are documents that aren't actively maintained any more, but are linked here for historical interest:

Gerald Oskoboiny sysreq@w3.org
originally by Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.55 2001/06/29 08:28:35 gerald Exp $