How to I set up a CVS repository for use?
Submitted by: mpotter
Submitted on: September 9, 2004
CDS CVS Setup
Please see the subversion FAQ. CVS is destinend to be decommissioned.
CDS CVS Setup
This page describes how to set up CVS repositories for remote access
through the CDS CVS pserver. Assume that your CDS username is
fred and you want to give access to two collaborators of
yours, alice and bob, to two different CVS roots
called sysroot and avroot.
Setting up the CVS roots
To set up a CVS repository for access through the CDS CVS pserver,
do the following steps.
- Create the directory cvs_roots in your home
directory. This will contain one or more CVS root directories.
- Create the new root directories by running the commands:
cvs -d /home/users/fred/cvs_roots/sysroot init
cvs -d /home/users/fred/cvs_roots/avroot init
Each time that you add a new root directory, you will have to wait for
up to one hour before the system activates it.
- Create the file
/home/users/fred/cvs_roots/cvs_passwd. Each line in this
file will specify a username and password for a remote user of your
CVS repositories, as well as listing which roots they should have
access to. An example file is:
alice:qwerty:sysroot,avroot
bob:asdfg:sysroot
This specifies that the passwords for alice and bob
are qwerty and asdfg, respectively. User alice has
acess to /home/users/fred/cvs_roots/sysroot and
/home/users/fred/cvs_roots/avroot, while bob only has access
to /home/users/fred/cvs_roots/sysroot. Note that if a user
has access to a root then they automatically have read and write
access to all of the modules within that root.
- Process the cvs_passwd file to produce the
per-root passwd files by running the command:
cd /home/users/fred/cvs_roots
cds_process_cvs_passwd
You must rerun this command any time that you make changes to the
cvs_passwd file.
That's it! You will need to wait up to one hour for the system to
activate your new CVS roots, but then you will be free to access them
remotely using the syntax:
cvs -d :pserver:alice@cvs.cds.caltech.edu:/home/users/fred/cvs_roots/sysroot cvscommand
Creating modules inside your CVS roots
Now that you have made one or more CVS roots, you need to create
modules within them to hold your projects.
The easiest way to create a project is to start with some files for
the project. For example, assume that you already have a TeX file
called fl.tex and you would like to create a module called
fl-paper starting with this TeX file, and that this module
should go inside the avroot CVS root.
To do this, put the fl.tex file in a directory all by itself
and change into that directory. Then run the command
cvs -d /home/users/fred/cvs_roots/avroot import -m 'Initial files' fl-paper base start
This module will now be available for checkout by authorized users,
such as alice, by running the commands
cvs -d :pserver:alice@cvs.cds.caltech.edu:/home/users/fred/cvs_roots/avroot login
cvs -d :pserver:alice@cvs.cds.caltech.edu:/home/users/fred/cvs_roots/avroot checkout fl-paper
Access control with cvs_passwd
Using the above system with multiple CVS roots and multiple modules
within each root, there is clearly a lot of choice about whether
different projects should be grouped together under one root, given
their own roots, or something in between.
The correct layout of roots and modules will depend on your access
control requirements. If a group of people are all collaborating on
several projects, then it probably makes sense to group the modules
for those projects under a single root and then give everyone in the
group access to that root.
In contrast, if a different group of people work on each project (even
if there is overlap), then it is probably best to put each project
module in its own root and control access in a very fine grained
way. In this case, it is often easiest to keep the module and root
names identical.
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