anoncvs.FreeBSD.org gone?

Jon Noack noackjr at alumni.rice.edu
Tue May 25 03:17:50 PDT 2004


On 05/25/04 04:30, Maxime Henrion wrote:
> Jon Noack wrote:
>> On 05/25/04 03:17, Colin Percival wrote:
>>> At 09:07 25/05/2004, Jon Noack wrote:
>>>> For the last couple days I have been unable to resolve 
>>>> anoncvs.FreeBSD.org.  It appears to have disappeared even from
>>>> the FreeBSD DNS servers:
>>> 
>>> I believe that anoncvs was recently taken offline due to security
>>> concerns.
>> 
>> OK.
>> 
>>>> The handbook still mentions anoncvs.FreeBSD.org -- what is the
>>>> best anonymous CVS server for someone in the US?
>>> 
>>> This may be a silly question, but why do you need anoncvs?
>> 
>> Well, I've made various local modifications to the source tree that
>> are easy to keep around with anoncvs.  For example, I got mad at
>> the output of file(1) for recent versions of FreeBSD and created a
>> patch for it (see below for more info).  I've written a script to
>> reapply the patch after every CVSup, but this script is only
>> workable if you have a limited number of patches.  After a while
>> (adding more patches) I got fed up and started using anoncvs
>> instead and let CVS do the merging. Can you recommend a better way
>> of doing this?  I wouldn't it put it past myself to miss the
>> obvious here...
> 
> You should simply use CVSup to get the CVS repository (just remove
> the tag=foo setting in your supfile) and then checkout a local CVS
> tree from this repo.  This is how I (and AFAIK, many developers) do
> to maintain patches against FreeBSD.  It's very convenient.

Wow, that is remarkably easy.  I wonder how I missed it.  I guess after 
seeing anoncvs I just stopped looking.  I do remember at some point 
getting curious why so many patches seemed to be against /home/ncvs/...

To prove this is documented (and that I am wasting everyone's time), 
here's the section on it in the handbook (on the A.5 Using CVSup page):
"There is an important special case that comes into play if you specify 
neither a tag= field nor a date= field. In that case, you receive the 
actual RCS files directly from the server's CVS repository, rather than 
receiving a particular version. Developers generally prefer this mode of 
operation. By maintaining a copy of the repository itself on their 
systems, they gain the ability to browse the revision histories and 
examine past versions of files. This gain is achieved at a large cost in 
terms of disk space, however."

Returning to the pointy hat and well-worn carpet in my corner,
Jon



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