Help - CVS has been dumped on me!

[jim westoby]

Hi

 

(I can't get onto a news server - for some reason it's been dead for about 2 months. Apologies if this is the wrong place to send it - although this is what the link generated.

 

 

 

I've been told to look at CVS (to replace PVCS which causes problems with the US office).

 

Our H/W bod has played with it and written a few things but he's away right now and I can't get it to work at all.

 

 

I'm using WinCVS (on NT) and the client is installed and operational. I can login and have set CVSROOT to where I was told.

 

 

Doing a Admin/Macro Admin/List gives -

cvs server: cannot open /dev/null/.cvsignore: Not a directory

exe/connect exe/connect

lib/generic lib/generic

However when I try to checkout/module on exe/connect I get -

 

cvs checkout -P exe/connect (in directory C:\)

cvs server: cannot open /dev/null/.cvsignore: Not a directory

cvs [server aborted]: can't chdir(/dev/null): Not a directory

*****CVS exited normally with code 1*****

 

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Working from the command line (not just a point & click merchant - I started on Unix).

I can Telnet into the port 2401 and get rebuffed by CVS so it [the server] seems to be up and running OK. I can't Telnet into any other port on our server they're firewalled.

 

At the prompt I set the CVSROOT value (as before for WinCVS) and trying as before gives -

D:\TEMP>"d:\Program Files\GNU\WinCVS\cvs" checkout  exe/Connect
cvs checkout: No CVSROOT specified!  Please use the `-d' option
cvs [checkout aborted]: or set the CVSROOT environment variable.

Using -d (user & server name changed for security) gives -

D:\TEMP>"d:\Program Files\GNU\WinCVS\cvs" -d address@hidden.emtex.com:/usr/local/cvsroot  checkout  exe/Connect
cvs [checkout aborted]: cannot connect to socket: Connection refused

 

(I couldn't find a way of getting the module list from the command line.)

Trying to login doesn't seem to work either ('can only be used with pserver method').

 

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Basically what I would like is -

A remedial description of how to checkout from the command line (to prove it works)

A blow by blow description of how to checkout (exe/connect above) using WinCVS.

 

Once I've got started then it should be more obvious but at the moment it's just sitting there looking at me and spitting error messages which I don't know what they 'mean' to CVS.

(OK I know what Not a directory means but why is it needed does this only work with superuser privilege or something?)

I don't have a login (as myself or root) on the Unix box so I'm limited as to what I can do - but even just being able to say I couldn't do it because I needed a login/it was not set up correctly/etc is progress of a sort!

(Spot the person covering his back here.)

 

Any help is appreciated, sorry it was so long but I thought complete info was called for.

 

    jim westoby

    address@hidden