CVS is a program to help manage having multiple people work on the same material simultaneously. Every user creates a local copy of the main repository. The local copies can be on the same machine, or across the world. Users can then modify the local copy as they wish and when the modified material is ready, commit the changes back to the main repository.
For a read only access it's possible
to use the web
frontend. There exist also many graphical CVS clients such as
KDE's cervisia.
This document describes the workflow with the command line program
cvs, other clients provide similar functionality.
CVS will not let you commit a file if the copy in the main repository has been modified since your last update. This is not normally a problem as you can still update your local copy. If the modifications were to different parts than you were working on, the changes are silently merged. If the changes affect the same area you were working on, you will be warned that there is a conflict and you need to edit the file to fix the problem before committing.
In what follows anonymous access will be used as an example. If you have access to another account which gives you write permission to the repository then you should use that account instead. If you are planning on making changes, you should get an account before starting as anonymous users cannot commit changes. See the section on write access for more information.
To begin using CVS, you must first login to the CVS server
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/webwml login
(just hit enter for the password here)
To check out a copy of the wml files on your local machine, you need to use
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/webwml checkout webwml
You can check out a subset of the pages like this:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/webwml checkout -l \
webwml webwml/<language>
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/webwml checkout \
webwml/Perl webwml/english/template webwml/<language>/Pics
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/webwml checkout \
webwml/<language>/<path to desired files>
Repeat for all subdirectories or files that you want. The second line includes all the files you will need if you wish to create HTML from the WML files. Partial checkouts such as these aren't really supported, though, so the above instructions may not always work.
If you have been given a username with a password, insert that instead of anonymous, like this:
cvs -d :ext:username@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/webwml checkout webwml/english/doc
From then on, you will not need to use the '-d :ext:...'
part. Every few days you will want to do a
cvs update -d
to retrieve any files from the repository which have changed. The
-d update option will add any new directories, automatically.
You may want to create a ~/.cvsrc file so that you don't have
to type some options all the time. For example, it can contain:
cvs -z9 update -d -P diff -u
The following is for those who have write permission on the repository. When you are done with a page, you can commit your changes to the repository using
cvs commit <file>.wml
or
cvs commit <dir> (to commit all the changes in <dir>)
or
cvs commit (to commit all changes from the current dir down)
If you are the first person translating a page, you need to do
cvs add <file>.wml
before you commit it. Note that cvs add is not recursive so
you need to add a directory before you can add its contents.
For more information on CVS, use info cvs.
To obtain write access to the website, please request
to join the webwml project on Alioth.