Re: remote cvs newbie question

[Eric Siegerman]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2001 at 02:41:56PM -0500, Robert Nikander wrote:
> I would like to use CVS to keep up with the 'bleeding edge' code for some
> of these open-source development projects.  Basically my question is...
> can CVS be used to just download the differences every few days, without
> getting all the files?

Yes.  That's what CVS does (among other things).

The initial checkout will take a while if it's a large source
tree, but subsequent "cvs update"'s consist essentially of
downloading diffs (there's a certain amount of overhead of
course, for the client and server to decide amongst themselves
which diffs are needed).

> And if so, what is the best way?

Just use CVS as instructed.

> Or do I need a different tool.

Nope.  There's a thing called CVSup, but:
  - I'm not sure quite what it does, so I can't tell you why you
    might prefer it over straight CVS, or vice-versa
  - It needs support from the project maintainers, so if they're
    not set up for it, you can't use it

> I just checked out the 'gnome-python' module from the GNOME cvs server. To
> do an update it sends the file to the server.  That will take a ton of
> time and is not what I want.

This only happens if the CVS client thinks you've changed the
file since the last "cvs update" or "cvs commit" (more correctly,
since *that file* was last updated or committed).  The way CVS
determines this is by looking at the file's last-modified
timestamp.  So, if you read the file into an editor to look at
it, and then saved it before exiting -- even if you made no
changes -- CVS considers it "locally modified", and has to send
it back to the server, which is where the "diff" is performed to
figure out that nothing in fact changed.

Another possibility is that something's messing with the
timestamps of the files in your sandbox.  For example, people
have recently been talking about a problem where WinCVS on
Windows got confused by the daylight-savings switchover, so that
all files were considered "locally modified".

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
The world has been attacked.  The world must respond ... [but] we must
be guided by a commitment to do what works in the long run, not by what
makes us feel better in the short run.
        - Jean Chrétien, Prime Minister of Canada