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CVS Server Administration Tips?

Posted by Cliff on from the care-and-feeding-of-source-repositories dept.

Twintop asks: "The company I'm working for has asked me to take over administration of their CVS server for a decent sized project. The current setup of the CVS server needs to be wiped clean and started fresh. The only times I've ever used CVS (and used it poorly at that) was with a few SourceForge.net (An OSTG Site) projects. What are some suggestions on reference materials for a newbie to CVS (but not to Linux) and methods of administration that have worked for you in the past?"

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. cvs with ssh by OmniVector · · Score: 4, Informative
    i'd use cvs with ssh. you'll want to give everyone an ssh account on a particular machine. create the cvs directory and give it a group sticky bit:

    mkdir /srv/cvs
    chmod 2770 /srv/cvs
    groupadd cvs
    chown root:cvs /srv/cvs

    this way, any files created/modified within that directory will retain their group writable permissions. you'll need to set the CVS_UMASK variable for each user as such in the shell of the remote machine they'll be using CVS from.
    export CVS_UMASK=002

    you'll need to set the CVS_RSH variable to ssh, so it tunnels:
    export CVS_RSH=ssh

    and your cvs home will look something like:
    export CVSROOT=:ext:username@hostname:/srv/cvs

    to make it even more convient, i suggest you research ssh-agent/ssh-keygen and use keys. no more passwords, with security and group protections
    --
    - tristan
  2. Re:The BEST CVS administration method by tanguyr · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you have an opportunity to, chuck it and use Subversion instead.

    One thing to remember is that although subversion may be the new hotness, it's the NEW hotness. By this i mean that while there are certainly bugs and problems in cvs, they are most likely *known* bugs and problems - unless your usage is way out there on the cutting edge, the likelihood that you will discover a brand new never seen before bug in cvs is quite low. Sadly, the same can't be said for svn - not because it has quality issues but because it's a younger product. Whilst it's true that no open source project gets very far without users and bug reports, this is still something to keep in mind when making a "cvs vs svn" decision.

    Just my 0.02$

    --
    #!/usr/bin/english