CVS history access?

[John Nielsen]

I'm working on a machine learning project and I'd like to use the FreeBSD 
src CVS commit history as a datasource. Is there a resource-friendly way 
for me to download some or all of it? Format isn't too big an issue.

I tried a few "cvs history" commands against the anoncvs servers but get 
this:
cvs [history aborted]: cannot open history file: /home/ncvs/CVSROOT/history: 
No such file or directory

I'm not too experienced with cvs so if I'm missing something let me know. 
The Mailman archives for freebsd-cvs are one option, but I was hoping for 
more of a direct approach if possible.

Thanks,

JN