[PRL] Setting up CVS repository for remote access

[Richard Cobbe]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 11:45:28AM -0400, Galen Williamson wrote:
> 
> I relied on this capability heavily during my dissertation...
> 
> There's a CCIS howto for remotely accessing a CVS repository, but the
> short of it is to use CVS_RSH=ssh, and a CVSROOT like
> 
> :ext:wand at denali.ccs.neu.edu:/home/wand/path-to-cvsroot
> 
> This works great with cygwin, but I haven't tried wincvs.
> 
> Shared access would require the other user have a CCIS unix account and
> read/write access to your CVS directories and files.

Galen is correct.  To fill in a couple of missing details:

First, depending on how you've got your environment variables set up on
denali, you may need to set the following environment variable on the
*client*:
        CVS_SERVER=/arch/gnu/bin/cvs
To determine if this is necessary, try the following from any unix
machine (including denali):
        ssh denali cvs -v
If this prints out the CVS version banner, you're good to go.
If, on the other hand, you get an error about not being able to find the
cvs binary, you'll need CVS_SERVER.

If you want to mount your CCS home directory to access your working
copy, then you'll want to ensure that the CVS/Root uses the :ext:
mumblage that Galen gave above.  Short of some search-and-replace
action, the easiest way to change this for an existing working copy is
to commit everything, delete the working copy, then check it out from
the new root location.

Mounting your CCS home directory on your laptop to access your
repository is a bad idea.  First, there are naming problems, as you've
discovered.  Second, CVS is known to be a little flaky on repositories
that are accessed through NFS; this may or may not extend to other
file-sharing systems.

Finally, one drawback to Galen's suggestion is that it will require you
to type in your CCS password for every CVS operation.  Setting up
ssh-agent and a public-key authentication system can make that
unnecessary; let me know if you want more on that.  (It's an involved
process, so I won't go into details here.)

Richard