Re: [Cvs-dev] cvs features for gnu savannah

[Thorsten Glaser]

Bob Proulx dixit:

>>Thorsten Glaser wrote:
>> I can do that, although I strongly recommend against using pserver
>> *at all*.
>
>As you are an expert in this area can you say why?
>
>What do you recommend for anonymous checkouts?  Is there an
>alternative?

Why yes, anoncvs of course, pioneered in 1999 by OpenBSD:
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf

In MirBSD, we use the same mechanism, although the faux login
shell used allows both cvs server and rsync, so people can also
download the entire repository and use it (save for checkin) in
offline mode.

This is also supported by FusionForge.

>For many years anyone could checkout projects using the pserver
>without needing an active ssh account.  If that were lost it would be
>a great loss and I am sure most would not be happy.

Yes, but people can ssh in to the user anoncvs or _anoncvs, either
with no password at all (possibly at another port) or with a well-known
one (OpenBSD uses user anoncvs pass anoncvs).

Of course, you can continue running pserver, although, please, in
read-only mode. (The sanity testsuite passes for me, so I didn’t
break anything supported by upstream at least, although a very small
number of people weren’t happy I removed the Debian-specific automatic
repository creation, cvsd, etc. – but that’s half a decade ago.)

>> >We need this feature for savannah, so we will continue to use it,
>> 
>> Is this the only feature not in 1.12.13 you absolutely need?
>
>Yes.

OK.

>because no one else would know of the locally patched version.  If
>these patches were in an official release then we wouldn't need to be
>maintaining our own source fork.  That way Savannah would get the

True, although for that point it doesn’t matter whether “in an official
release” means upstream or distribution.

>There is a platform-testers AT gnu.org mailing list where one may ask

Oh, good.

Thanks,
//mirabilos
-- 
„Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund,
mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“
        -- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert
(EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)