How to use CVS

Accessing the repository from the department's computers

In order to access the CVS repository from the department's computers, you'll have to set your CVSROOT environment variable to the location of the CVS repository. You can include the following line in the .profile file in your home directory so that you don't need to type it for every session:

export CVSROOT="/home/group/dacopan/cvsroot/"

After this, checking out the project is easy:

cvs checkout dacopan

where dacopan is the name of our CVS module.

Accessing the repository from the outside

The CVS repository is accessible from the outside using SSH as the connection method. For the command line client, you have to set two environment variables. For example:

export CVS_RSH="ssh"
export CVSROOT=":ext:username@melkinpaasi.cs.helsinki.fi:/home/group/dacopan/cvsroot/"

The CVS_RSH variable specifies the connection method to be used. In the CVSROOT variable you have to specify your own username at the department. Also, instead of melkinpaasi.cs.helsinki.fi you can use any other server accepting connections at the CS department. After setting the variables, you can do the checkout in the usual way and cvs program will ask for your password.

CVS client software

In addition to the command-line cvs client available in standard Linux distributions, for example, you might want to check out these graphical CVS clients as well:

http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
http://www.wincvs.org/