Querying a cvsup server

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Lowell Gilbert wrote:

> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> writes:
>
>> On Mon, 6 Feb 2012, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
>>
>>> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Is there a way to query one of the FreeBSD cvsup mirrors, something
>>>> like 'svn list -v svn:...' (only with cvs or csup)?  I'm looking to
>>>> find the revision or date of a file.
>>>
>>> Anonymous CVS is probably the best approach for you.
>>> It's covered in the Handbook.
>>
>> The goal is to check arbitrary files on FreeBSD cvsup servers to see
>> if they are up to date.  AFAIK, there are only a couple of anoncvs
>> servers and the normal cvsupN.freebsd.org servers don't do that.
>
> It's not clear why you're insisting on using the cvsup servers as
> opposed to anonymous CVS,

I'm not looking for a specific version of a file, but trying to find out 
whether any arbitrary cvsup mirror is current with the main repository.
Not version control, but network monitoring.

Rephrasing: "cvsupN.freebsd.org, do you have the latest version of the 
doc and src trees?"

> but if you have to use those, then you need to download the whole 
> repository in "CVS mode" and use cvs with that. The cvsup protocol 
> does not support version control operations.

It's desirable to keep bandwidth usage low.

csup can be forced with -i to only download one file, and that file has 
the creation date.  The trick to taking that as a freshness indicator 
for the whole would be picking a file that changes on every commit.  Or 
maybe "sup/*/checkouts.cvs:.", which is updated even when -i specifies a 
nonexistent file.