17.4. Installing and Using CVSup

You can find the CVSup client for your system at ftp://postgresql.org/pub/CVSup and general information at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/!nanbor/CVSUP/. Instructions detailing how to configure CVSup to access the KDE CVS are available at http://www.kde.org/cvsup.html.

You will need to create a text file containing configuration information for CVSup. Listing 18.1 shows a sample.

   1 
   2 1: *default host=cvsup.kde.org
   3 2: *default base=/usr/src/kde
   4 3: *default prefix=/usr/src/kde
   5 4: *default release=cvs
   6 5: *default delete
   7 6: *default compress
   8 7: *default tag=.
   9 8: *default use-rel-suffix
  10 9: kdeall
  11 

The host entry tells the name of the cvsup server to connect to. The base directory is where cvsup will place its bookkeeping files. prefix specifies the directory under which to place all files retrieved from the CVS. prefix is usually the same as base. release is a relic from a CVSup ancestor, sup. It should always be set to cvs. The delete keyword gives cvsup your permission to delete files in your copy of the CVS repository that are no longer needed (for example, the maintainer of that package has removed the file from CVS). compress instructs the cvsup server to compress the information it sends to you; this generally speeds the transfer. The tag is the name of the CVS branch to get. The . refers to the default branch (which is HEAD). The use-rel-suffix keyword tells cvsup to append a suffix formed from the release and tag to the filename of an index of file that it maintains. This helps you keep track of copies of multiple CVS branches.

Basic usage of cvsup looks like the following:

   1 
   2 cvsup configfile
   3 

where configfile is the path to the configuration file discussed in the previous paragraph. A full description of cvsup options can be found in the cvsup man page; type man cvsup.