The Hindu : Accessing CVS files

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 15, 2004

Business

Business

Accessing CVS files

THIS WEEK NetSpeak takes a look at the features of the version control system and explores a tool that can be used to access files from the popular versioning system called CVS.

If you do any project -whether it is a software project, web site development project or a documentation project- the content (code/text) will certainly get continuously updated. It is likely that as the project progresses, its resources expand and undergoes many changes.

The process becomes more complicated if the project is a collaborative work done by many people. Here, all the members of the project team should be able to view/modify the content. The team should know such details as `what are the corrections made,' `who did it' and so on.

It is obvious that unless we have a proper system that can automatically take care of these requirements of a project, the whole project will get derailed. That is, we need an archive to store different versions of the project documents with the necessary tools that let us retrieve them in multiple ways. For example, if one team member wants to have a look at an older version the tool should have the feature to do this. Likewise, if one person wants to see the difference between two versions of a document, the system should provide the necessary tools to do it. If two or more members of the team simultaneously edit a file, the system should make sure that the file is updated properly and includes both corrections. The product that has been developed to meet such project requirements is known as version control system.

A version control system allows you to store all the versions of project materials under a specified directory (called repository) and lets you retrieve any version of a file from it anytime. The system provides the necessary features that help any authorised member to post new contributions, edit/alter existing content (with comments) and this way facilitates any number of people to work on a collaborative project with little hassle. Also, it maintains a record of the changes made on a file, which can be used to track each of the changes made by the people concerned.

At present there are many version control systems available and the product, Concurrent Version System (CVS), which is used by popular services such as SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/) is one of them. Now, let us see how we can access the contents from a CVS repository.

Concurrent version systems

As the latest version of any project will be available on its CVS repository, if you want to download the latest version, you should take it from the CVS repository. CVS is a client-server system, where the repository is hosted on the server and to access the server you need a CVS client.

Most of the projects that have CVS support provide the details on how to access its CVS server. For example, access this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin/, where the project phpMyAdmin is hosted. Click on the option `CVS' to access the web-based interface of the CVS repository. Here you will find the details on how to retrieve the various project modules using a CVS client. If you want to view the project files/directory structure/various changes made to a file (version history) through the Web, use the web-based CVS viewer (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/ phpmyadmin/).

CVS clients

A Linux user does not need to worry about the CVS client, as it is already available with the system. Windows users should download one. CVSGui, a graphical CVS client is a good product worth trying for this purpose. This open-source, free software, available on such platforms as Windows and Mac, can be downloaded from: http://www.wincvs.org/. As this software needs Python (http://www.python.org/) for its smooth operation, you need to download/install it also.

Now, let us see how we can retrieve the latest phpMyAdmin files from the CVS server with CVSGui. Anyone can download the repository contents using the anonymous log-in. Start WinCVS, input such parameters as repository path, host address and username (details are available here: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/? group_id=23067). To download the files from the repository on to the local folder, move to menu option, `Remote' and select the option `Checkout module'. Type the module name as `phpMyAdmin' on to input window that pops up and press the `OK' button. If everything went smooth, you will find the files from the repository flowing on to your specified local folder.

Before winding up this part of the column, I would like to express my thanks to software developers Mr. Raj and Mr. Anil for their valuable inputs.

Resources

The CVS book (http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/): A free book on CVS, which contains complete information on version control systems and CVS.

CVS Home (http://www.cvshome.org/): A site dedicated to the CVS community

Co-Citer: Web page

text recorder

While on the Net we frequently come across web pages with valuable content. Most often we would be keen to extract/store a part of the content so that it can be read later, off line. One way to do this is to block the relevant text, copy it and paste it on to a local text file with necessary comments. Though this will serve the purpose, the process is certainly inefficient/monotonous. The free tool, Cogitum Co-Citer (http://www.cogitum.com/) that allows you extract text from web pages and store it on to its database with such details as the page's URL, title and date on which the data is captured is a good solution to this problem. A drawback of the program is that it works only with the IE browser.

After installing the program, restart IE and whenever you are on a web page whose content needs to be extracted, block it, press the right-click button and click on the `Grab Selected text..' option. Text recorded through Co-citer this way can be retrieved by invoking the program `Cogitum Co-citer' from the `Start' menu.

J. Murali

Email the author at:

murali27@satyam.net.in

J. Murali Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

Email the author at:

murali27@satyam.net.in

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