Whats this CVS thing that everyone keeps talking about, and how do I access it? [GTK 2.x]

CVS is the Concurrent Version System and is a very popular means of version control for software projects. It is designed to allow multiple authors to simultanously operate on the same source tree. This source tree is centrally maintained, but each developer has a local mirror of this repository that they make their changes to.

The GTK+ developers use a CVS repository to store the master copy of the current development version of GTK+. As such, people wishing to contribute patches to GTK+ should generate them against the CVS version. Normal people should use the packaged releases.

The CVS toolset is available as RPM packages from the usual RedHat sites. The latest version is available at http://download.cyclic.com/pub/

Anyone can download the latest CVS version of GTK+ by using anonymous access using the following steps:

• In a bourne shell descendant (e.g. bash) type:

  CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'
  export CVSROOT

• Next, the first time the source tree is checked out, a cvs login is needed.

  cvs login

  This will ask you for a password. There is no password for cvs.gimp.org, so just enter a carriage return.

• To get the tree and place it in a subdir of your current working directory, issue the command:

  cvs -z3 get gtk+

  Note that with the GTK+ 1.1 tree, glib has been moved to a separate CVS module, so if you don't have glib installed you will need to get that as well:

  cvs -z3 get glib

The CVS archive stores both the current development version of GTK+ (the CVS HEAD branch) and all current and past stable versions. If you want to retrieve a specific version of GTK+ you have to specify the CVS tag corresponding to the version you want to checkout. If you want to checkout the current GTK+ 2.2 stable source code, you would need to use the following command:

cvs -z3 get -r gtk-2-2 gtk+