CVS Enhancements

cvsEnhancements is a collection of useful scripts and patches to flesh out a CVS installation with various features. For more information about a particular script, see the comments in that script.

This project is mostly obsolete. I still use CVS to distribute some common configuration files for my home directory on various machines (such as .bashrc, .vimrc, etc), where versioning different files semi-independently with CVS can be an advantage, but no longer use CVS for anything else. See git instead.

Links

(this page)

Front end, user-callable scripts
Back end, server-called scripts
Source Patches
Setting things up
Related Projects
Contact Information

(nearby pages)

Merge History Proposal - Preliminary design and proposal for having CVS remember merges and use the history to make the common-ancestor finding algorithm for future merges work better.
WishList.txt - My personal CVS TODO list, which I call the "Wish List" to distiguish it from the TODO list in the CVS source distribution.
Sourceforge cvsEnhancements Project Page

(external sites)

Original CVS Homepage (dead for years now) This site used to have a page listing various add-ons (some of which were more fleshed out than cvsEnhancements), but I haven't found a replacement list.
GNU CVS page (exists, but not really maintained)
You could also search for cvsnt, opencvs, subversion, etc. But these days all of these seem to be mostly dead; distributed systems like git are so much better...

Front end, user-callable scripts

cvs-ls-files: General purpose script that lists revision-controlled files in your sandbox under your current directory. It has an interface similar to "git ls-files", only for CVS.
cvsHtmlDiff: For code reviews: A perl script that reads in output from "cvs diff" specifiing the difference between any repository version and the sandbox in the current directory, and outputs an easy-to-browse HTML site showing the differences. Generates one web page per changed file, consisting of a well formatted table showing differences. Also works with "git diff" in a git sandbox.
cvsSync: A script for syncronizing changes across multiple copies of a CVS working area. This is especially useful for trying out changes on multiple architecures before committing those changes.
cvsAdd, cvsCommit, cvsOut, cvsRemove, cvsUnedit: Higher level operations related to cvsSync. (These are actually symlinks to cvsSync.) The makeLinks script can be used to create these links.
nmount, numount, force_umount: Some scripts to use for quickly mounting/unmounting Windows NT drives. force_umount should be suid-root. The nmount and numount scripts use smbmount and smbumount, so smbmount/smbumount should be installed suid-root.
cvsCheck: A script to tell you who has what RCS locks in a CVS repository.
cvsPasswd: A general purpose tool for maintaining the CVS pserver "passwd", "writers", and "users" files. It should be installed suid-root.
cvsChangeLocation: A script for rebinding a sandbox to a repository.

Back end, server-called scripts

cvsPserver: A script to indirectly look up valid CVSROOTs and invoke "cvs pserver". Put this in /etc/inetd.conf instead of cvs itself.
doLog: A fairly generic generic logging script to invoke from loginfo; it logs to both a full featured log and a simple one-line-per-file lightweight log. It can also send email about commits to configurable lists of users.
doNotify: A relatively fancy notify script that sends mail to both the watching user and the user that did the action that was watched for. Mainly intended to let both users know if they are editting the same file. I would prefer to send a message directly, but that would probably require source modifications to avoid messing up the remote access communications protocol.
cvsPasswd.cgi: A web-callable wrapper around cvsPasswd.
accumMail: A generic program to group multiple mail messages sent to a user in a short period of time into one message. The other scripts use this script, if available.
commitCheck: A commitinfo script to verify compliance with some trivial-to-test-for coding standards.
commitCheck.config: Goes with commitCheck.
preCommitChecks.html: Goes with commitCheck.

Source Patches

Advisory Locks (external page): [OBSOLETE: A heavily modified variation of this patch has been incorporated into cvs 1.12.x.] My Version of the Advisory Lock Patch. For advisory locks, be sure to download the latest dated version (editCheck-25feb2002.diff at the time I was writing this). But the first, no-date version (editCheck.diff) also includes a socket record/playback testing tool that might be interesting on it's own.
sticky-output.patch: A patch to cause "cvs update" to print out sticky option information.
CVS_AUTH_USER.patch: [OBSOLETE: You can just use "$USER" in the *info config files to pass the pserver username in on the command line.] A patch to cause "cvs pserver" to store the authenticated user name (as opposed to the host user name) in the environment variable "CVS_AUTH_USER". doLog uses this value, if it is available.

Setting things up

In my environment, I have CVS running in pserver mode. My /etc/inetd doesn't invoke pserver directly. Instead, it invokes the cvsPserver script. cvsPserver parses the /etc/cvsRepositories file, and then invokes "cvs pserver" with the appropriate "--allow-root" options. Generally, we always go through the pserver, even when running cvs on the local machine.

I have two special users for CVS: cvsadmin and cvsuser. In /etc/passwd, the entries look like this (group 18 is called 'cvs'):

cvsadmin:*:407:18:CVS admin server:/home/cvs:/bin/false
cvsuser:*:408:18:CVS user:/home/cvs:/bin/false

cvsadmin is the owner of security-sensitive configuration files. It needs to be as carefully controlled as root, because if you can become cvsadmin, you can trivially become root as well. When I need to be cvsadmin, (e.g. to edit configuration files), I go through root:

su
<password>
su -s /bin/bash - cvsadmin

I generally keep the CVSROOT directory for each repository checked out somewhere under /home/cvs, so that I can easily edit the configuration files.

I have the cvs passwd file configured to map everyone to "cvsuser" (and in fact I disable access for anyone not in cvs's passwd file by setting SystemAuth=no in CVSROOT/config).

I also have a group "cvs" which allows me to give cvsadmin, cvsroot, and possibly trusted power users full read access to everything under /home/cvsadmin, while preventing anyone else from accessing it directly. Note that security sensitive files (CVSROOT and all its parent directories) have to be read-only for everyone except "cvsadmin".

If you want to enforce everyone going through pserver, make CVSROOT mode 770, and don't put anyone except cvsadmin and cvsroot in the cvs group.

Related Projects

Sourceforge has a lot of projects related to CVS. Some projects that may provide capabilities similar (perhaps even superior) to some of the scripts in cvsEnhancements include: enhance CVS, cvsmail, CVSSupport, cvsauth, VChacks, and RCVS. There is actually a fairly large list of CVS-related projects on sourceforge; try running a search for "CVS".

At one time cvshome.org had an official list of addons, but cvshome.org has been dead for years now.

Contact Information

Currently, the only author of cvsEnhancments is Matthew Ogilvie, who can be reached at mmogilvi <at> users.sourceforge.net, or see his homepage.