CVS 1.11.1p1 Amiga port (05 August 2001) ======================================== Introduction ------------ This is a somewhat rough port of GNU CVS 1.11.1p1, a version control system, which allows you to keep old versions of files (usually source code), keep a log of who, when, and why changes occurred, etc., like RCS or SCCS. It handles multiple developers, multiple directories, triggers to enable/log/control various operations, and can work over a wide area network. The following tasks are not included; they can be done in conjunction with CVS but will tend to require some script-writing and software other than CVS: bug-tracking, build management (that is, make and make-like tools), and automated testing. (Quoted from the CVS documentation.) I call this a 'rough port' since it is not as polished as, say Heinz Wrobel's excellent 'RCS' port. It does what it needs to do, but a few features are sorely lacking, such as support for Amiga file protection bits. On the other hand, however, you get everything, and perhaps more, you got with the previous Amiga ports of CVS: this port does not require 'ixemul.library' to work and it does not require an RCS installation as it is completely self contained. The port also probably would win a price as the largest 'pure' executable; it can be made resident. What's in this package? ----------------------- This distribution contains the Amiga port, the Amiga specific source code and most of the original GNU CVS 1.11.1p1 distribution. 'Most' in this case means that only the original source code has been omitted in order to keep the distribution archive small; the documentation and support files are all provided. The original source code can be downloaded from the Internet at 'ftp://ftp.cvshome.org/pub/cvs-1.11.1p1/cvs-1.11.1p1.tar.gz'. I have added two more files which are converted from the original Unix man pages, namely 'cvs.1.man' and 'cvs.5.man' whose sources can be found in the 'cvs-1.11.1p1/man' directory. Installation; the easy part --------------------------- Almost everything you need to get CVS up and running is contained in the archive which also included the 'README.AMIGA' file you are currently reading. And that means the 'cvs' executable. You will also need a working 'queue-handler' (the one that ships with Workbench 3.1 and beyond is, unfortunately, broken) which can be found on Aminet (you can find the archive at 'http://us.aminet.net/pub/aminet/util/sys/HWGQueue.lha'). A TCP/IP stack like Miami or AmiTCP is supported but not strictly required: you can perfectly well keep your CVS repository on your local machine. Since CVS may ask you to edit the log entries associated with the files to store, you may want to configure the 'EDITOR' environment variable. Last, but not least, you must set up an environment variable which allows CVS to associate you with the changes you made; this should be the 'USER', 'LOGUSER' or 'USERNAME' variable. Most importantly, this port requires Kickstart 2.04 or higher. Here is how you could set up CVS on your machine. We start by creating two drawers on the 'Work:' volume: MakeDir Work:CVS-Root MakeDir Work:CVS-Home Next, we add two lines to the 'S:User-Startup' file: Assign CVSHOME: Work:CVS-Home Path CVSHOME: Add The CVS program will need to be copied: Copy cvs Work:CVS-Home CLONE And the path to the CVS repository needs to be set: SetEnv CVSROOT :local:Work:CVS-Root Copy ENV:CVSROOT ENVARC: Two environment variables need to be set up. Most importantly, CVS will need your ID to write it into the log and revision files it creates. The Amiga port will query three environment variables for that information, in the following order: 'USER', 'LOGUSER' and 'USERNAME'. This means if the variable 'USER' is not set, it will proceed to check whether 'LOGUSER' is set, and so forth. You may have already configured these variables, but if you haven't, I suggest you set up the 'LOGUSER' variable, like this: SetEnv LOGUSER Copy ENV:LOGUSER ENVARC: Note that should be replaced by a mnemonic, nick name or short name that must not contain any blank space characters. You may want to configure the 'EDITOR' environment variable to invoke your preferred text editor when CVS requests that log messages are added for an update. If this variable is not set, CVS will default to invoke the 'Ed' editor. This can be problematic if you have installed 'CygnusEd' whose 'Ed' program detaches from the Shell that invoked it. When CVS invokes the editor, it expects it to return only when the user has finished editing the respective file. Here is an example configuration for CygnusEd: SetEnv EDITOR Ed -keepio And here is one for TurboText: SetEnv EDITOR TTX WAIT Don't forget to save the environment variable setting to make it permanent, like this: Copy ENV:EDITOR ENVARC: Finally, install the 'queue-handler' from Aminet and reboot your machine. When the system is again up and running, initialize the CVS repository like this: cvs init And that's all. Well, maybe you want to add a few default options to the configuration file CVS reads upon startup. That file should be placed in the 'CVSHOME:' directory and called '.cvsrc'. Networked operation and SSH --------------------------- This CVS port includes built-in remote shell (rsh) and secure shell (ssh) client code, which allows you to exchange files with networked, non-local CVS repositories. To use a remote repository, you will need to change the name of the CVS root directory. For a local repository, you would use the following commands to set it up, like this: SetEnv CVSROOT :local:Work:CVS-Root Copy ENV:CVSROOT ENVARC: But if the repository were on a remote machine, you would use something like this: SetEnv CVSROOT :server:login@host:/usr/local/cvsroot Copy ENV:CVSROOT ENVARC: In that example, you would replace 'login' with your account name on the networked machine called 'host'; the '/usr/local/cvsroot' refers to the fully qualified name of the CVS root directory. Note that for this to work, you need to have a shell login account on the remote machine, and that machine must be configured to allow for remote shell login. As the remote shell login is rather risky and insecure, most sites will have it disabled. Bad luck, but there is an alternative: secure shell. This feature allows you to connect to a remote repository as with a remote shell login, except that the connection is made in a much secure fashion using encrypted data channels. This process requires that you have a login password handy, for which the CVS port will prompt you before it connects to the remote. To activate the secure shell feature, you would set an environment variable, like this: SetEnv CVS_RSH ssh This will cause the built-in secure shell (ssh) client to be used in place of the remote shell (rsh) client. The secure shell client implementation is a stripped down, simplified version of the real thing, the full-blown version, which supports more different and more secure encryption algorithms. What this version can do is just about the bare minimum, which means that it supports only two block cipher algorithms ('Triple DES' and 'Blowfish') and that the initial public key exchange is not as fast as it could be. It also only supports version 1.5 of the secure shell protocol. By default, the ssh client will resort to 'Triple DES' for encryption and decryption. To choose the 'Blowfish' algorithm instead (which runs faster than 'Triple DES'), use the following environment variable: SetEnv CVS_SSH_CIPHER blowfish Not all secure shell server implementations support the 'Blowfish' algorithm, but all servers are required to support 'Triple DES'. Thus, if you cannot connect to a server which aborts the protocol negotiation, it may be that it does not understand the choice of encryption algorithm. CAUTION: The majority of the CVS documentation I know recommends to use the keyword ':ext:' in place of ':server:' for communicating with a networked CVS installation -- this will *NOT* work with this Amiga port. What does work are the built-in rsh and ssh clients, and these require that you use the ':server:' keyword when specifying the name of the CVS root directory. Therefore the :ext: method is disabled in this port ! By default, the SSH client will attempt to connect to the server on port 22. This not always desirable, especially for custom SSH configurations. You can override this default choice of the port number using yet another environment variable, like this: SetEnv CVS_SSH_PORT 33194 Lets say some words on the implemented authentications system used in this Amiga CVS port. First of all normally if you use the internal ssh client of this port you will have to enter the password on every cvs action your perform to the repository. This is also the case for other cvs implementation on other platforms, so we considered this as the standard implementation. So there is normally no way to save this password in a password file like for the :pserver: method and the accordingly .cvspass file mechanism. As some users brought up the fact that this could be quite annoying if you regulary checkout from different servers within a script we considered to implement a possibility to save the authenticated password along with cvsroot string to a .cvspass like file structure. If you want to use this feature you have to specify the following environment variable: SetEnv CVS_SSH_PASSFILE CVSHOME:.sshpass But before you are going to use this feature let me first talk about the security aspects of this feature. As you normally use the ssh connection for security reasons it will break you security effort while using ssh together with cvs if you are going to use this PASSFILE feature because the encryption that is used in this PASSFILE is absolutly NOT secure and if someone has access to this passfile he is able to decrypt your password without any effort because this encryption is really NO real encryption at all. CAUTION: PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS BRINGS DOWN THE SECURITY ASPECTS OF SSH AND IF SOMEONE HAS ACCESS TO THIS PASSFILE HE HAS THE POSSIBILITY TO DECRYPT THE PASSWORD !!! SO THIS IS INSECURE LIKE :PSERVER: AND EVERYONE IS ENCOURAGED NOT TO USE THIS FEATURE AND KEEP ENTERING THE PASSPHRASE AT THE PROMPT !! So you should only use this feature if you really don`t care about security or if you can make sure that no other person has access to your computer. At least I would suggest to place this passfile in a uncommon directory away from standard pathes like S: or something like this. Also you should not mix the :pserver: based .cvspass file with this .sshpass file, because this can beside from the security aspects result in a unknown behaviour of cvs. Last but not least, a word on data compression. The SSH specification allows for data to be compressed before it is encrypted. This functionality is not implemented in the reduced SSH implementation which is part of this Amiga CVS port. This sounds like a disadvantage, but it need not to be. In fact, CVS can use data compression for data exchange, and the SSH layer on top of it could not have compressed this data any further. That's entropy for you... Usage ----- I personally found the default CVS documentation to be rather confusing. If you don't know rather well what CVS is good for, then the examples, the terminology, all this doesn't seem to make great sense. My introduction to CVS followed with Karl Fogel's book "Open Source Development with CVS" which describes in compact form what CVS is and how it may be used. I suggest that you consult the book (portions of which are available from 'www.coriolis.com') and/or the CVS documentation (which has been included with this archive in the 'cvs-1.11/doc' drawer) for hints and ideas on how to use the program. I would definitely not recommend that you spend any money on the CVS pocket reference manual written by Gregor N. Purdy, published by O'Reilly until *after* you have read an introductory book like Karl Fogel's. By its very nature, even a good pocket reference manual can only refresh your memory on concepts you have learned before -- if there is nothing to be refreshed in the first place, it will not be of any help to you. What many people fail to realize and what keeps them from using CVS in place of the revision control system they have used for years is that you do not need a networked CVS repository in order to use CVS. A local repository will do. In fact, I switched over most of my current software development projects to use a single local repository after I realized that CVS does much better what I had previously used RCS for. If you need any further documentation or information about CVS you could also use http://www.cvshome.org/ as a good search path. Also a good tutorial could be found at: http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html Notes on the implementation --------------------------- The Amiga port implements only the client side of the CVS system. This means that you can check out projects on remote servers but your local Amiga cannot be a CVS server itself. This feature was omitted deliberately since I could not find a safe and useful way to make CVS server mode work on the Amiga. AmigaOS is not a server operating system and shoehorning the code to make it work somehow would not have helped. If you need a CVS server, try a dedicated solution using, for example, 'NetBSD'. The Amiga port can communicate with the server using the remote shell (rsh) and secure shell (ssh) protocols, and I have verified that the process works reasonably well with, for example, the public 'Samba' CVS repository. CVS does not have a very sophisticated porting layer. Its file name semantics all stem from the Unix world and the 'OS/2', 'VMS' and 'Windows NT' ports merely resort to flipping slashes in file names, if necessary, when it comes to make a name fit the local system's semantics. I had to find a similar way to make the semantics work on the Amiga. What I did was to add a translation service in the Amiga specific code which knows how to translate names like '.' or '..'. But that's where it ends. Any more sophisticated naming schemes like 'foo/.././bar' may fail to translate properly. But then, those complex patterns should be pretty rare anyway. Unlike Heinz Wrobel's excellent 'RCS' port, this CVS port does not preserve Amiga file protection bits for files checked in. When you check in a project and check it out again, all file and directory protection bits will default to 'rwed', losing the 'archived', 'pure' and 'script' bits. The Amiga port will expand wild card patterns for file and directory names specified as command line parameters, such as "#?.c". The wild card pattern syntax is that of AmigaDOS. It is *not* the syntax of the standard regular expressions other GNU tools will use. You can access remote CVS repositories by means of a properly configured TCP/IP stack. This port requires that the stack complies to the AmiTCP V3 API definition, which all modern Amiga TCP/IP stacks do. It does not work with the INet-225 TCP/IP stack, though. When CVS resorts to calling external programs, a working 'PIPE:' device is required, which is not yet part of the AmigaOS Workbench distribution. Do not underestimate this. The program will fail or behave erratically without a working 'PIPE:' device. It is strongly recommended to download a working 'queue-handler', such as from Aminet. The source code for the Amiga port is included in this distribution. All you need to know before you can recompile this CVS port is described in the file 'README.AMIGA' which you can find in the 'source' directory. This is a 'single user' CVS port. There is just one single home directory (referred to as 'CVSHOME:') and your login name and ID are assumed to be the same (set in the 'USER', 'LOGUSER' or 'USERNAME' environment variables). There is no 'cvsbug' shell script or program included with this port. Known problems and issues ------------------------- 1) Problems with Timezones It is known that a wrong set TimeZone "ENVARC:TZ" variable could cause problems while working with CVS. Please make sure that you use a proper time value in TZ. Something like "0200" for +2 GMT should be fine. 2) Filenames longer than supported filesystem size Another issue that can produce problems while working with cvs on Amiga is when you are using remote respositories (:pserver: or :server: method) and in this repositories are files with larger filenames than your filesystem on your checkout directory support. This filenames will be truncated to the maximum size that is allowed. This will cause that you cannot checkin this files again! 3) .cvspass error message with :pserver: If you use the :pserver: method together with cvs a message like the following can occur: --- cut here --- DH0: > cvs login Logging in to :pserver:damato@linux:2401/data/cvsroot/amiga CVS password: cvs login: failed to open CVSHOME:/.cvspass for reading: No such file or directory cvs [login aborted]: fatal error: exiting --- cut here --- The solution for this problem is quite simple. Just create a empty ".cvspass" file in your CVSHOME: directory and next time cvs will use this file to save the passwords. This is a normal cvs behaviour like in other ports !! Contacting the authors ---------------------- If you have any further questions on this port, feel free to contact us: Olaf Barthel Brabeckstr. 35 D-30559 Hannover Federal Republic of Germany olsen@sourcery.han.de Jens Langner Lannerstrasse 1 D-01219 Dresden Federal Republic of Germany Jens.Langner@htw-dresden.de