how to automate the check out of a separate, related CVS tree?

[Gary Funck]

Given the following directory structure:

   proj
     |
     |-- sub-proj1
     |
     |-- sub-proj2
     |
     |-- other files/dirs relating to proj

Where 'proj' is an overall project directory accessed remotely
as ext:cvshost:/cvs for example, and sub-proj1 and sub-proj2 are
based upon independent CVS trees hosted on other sites, such as
ext:proj1host.com:/cvs and ext:proj2host.com:/cvs, is there a
straightforward method for defining the CVS structure of the
overall project such that
  cvs co proj
Would grab all the files in 'proj' and then invoke cvs in such
a way that it will check out the sub-proj1 and sub-proj2 sub projects
such that their respective CVS control files point correctly to
the hosts they were derived from, so that commits and updates in
those sub-directories interact with their respective CVS repositories?

I thought of trying to do this via the modules file, along the following
lines:

sub-proj1 -o get-sub-proj1 -l proj/sub-proj1
sub-proj2 -o get-sub-proj1 -l proj/sub-proj1
proj proj &sub-proj1 &sub-proj2

on the assumption that the -l switch would create the directories, but not
recurse
into them, and the checkout action would then populate the sub-projects.
Good
theory, except that the 'prog' operations like -o operate on the server
side,
and not the client.

An alias would be good, if only there were a way to pass the ext: switch
to checkout:

sub-proj1 -a ext:proj1host.com:/cvs/sub-proj1
sub-proj2 -a ext:proj2host.com:/cvs/sub-proj2
proj proj &sub-proj1 &sub-proj2

but that is a no go as well. This can of course be automated with a
top-level
checkout script. Just wondering if there was a mechanism in CVS to do this?