running cvs from cgi program

[Mark Harrison]

I have a cgi script which does an anonymous pserver checkout
from sourceforge.  I'm a bit surprised that cvs looks in root's
home directory for .cvspass.

>cvs checkout: could not open /home/root/.cvspass: Permission denied
>cvs [checkout aborted]: use "cvs login" to log in first

I'm currently working around this by
    chmod 711 ~root2
    chmod 644 ~root2/.cvspass

So, two questions:

1.  In order to avoid having to do "cvs login" on anonymous accounts,
    would a "-a" flag for anonymous access be useful?  It could set
    the password to "".

2.  Why does cvs look for ~root/.cvspass instead of ~nobody/.cvspass?

3.  Any horrific side effects of the chmod?  This is a stock linux
    box, with no special secrets hiding in ~root.

TIA,
Mark

--
Mark Harrison                          AsiaInfo Holdings, Inc.
address@hidden                Beijing/Santa Clara