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GraphicsMagick Source Access Using CVS

The GraphicsMagick source is available via anonymous CVS. This is a convenient way for developers from around the country or world to download the GraphicsMagick source, fix bugs, or add new features.

What is CVS

CVS is the Concurrent Version System and is a very popular mean of version control for software projects. It is designed to allow multiple authors to be able to simultaneously 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.

CVSWeb Access

A CVSWeb interface is available which may be used to interactively view the latest versions of files, or the changes to files, using your web browser.

CVS Command Summary

Here is a summary of CVS commands. See the CVS Home Page for detailed information and documentation about CVS. The command "cvs –help-commands" will print out all of the available commands. The command "cvs command –help" will cause a help message to be printed for the specified "command".

Action | Result
add | Add a new file or directory to the repository.
checkout | Make a working directory of source files for editing.
commit | Apply changes to the source repository (write access).
diff | Show differences between local files and the source repository.
history | Show reports on cvs commands against the source repository.
log | Display CVS log information.
rdiff | Prepare a collection of differences reflecting changes between release.
status | Show current status of files in the repository and local copies.
update | Bring your working directory up to date with the repository.

Using Anonymous CVS

The source tree for GraphicsMagick is stored on `cvs.graphicsmagick.org`. To access the tree you need to first set up your CVSROOT environment variable so that cvs knows where to go to grab the source from. The proper value for CVSROOT is:

     :pserver:anonymous@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick

For example, in tcsh do:

     setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick

In a bourne shell descendant (e.g. bash) the following syntax has to be used

     export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick'

Or whatever the approriate syntax for your shell of choice is.

Alternatively, you can specify the cvs root directly on the command line:

     cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.graphicsmagick.org:/GraphicsMagick

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

     cvs login

This will ask you for a password. The password is anonymous. Enter it and press a carriage return.

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

     cvs co -P -r GraphicsMagick-1_0 GraphicsMagick

Or to save bandwidth get the compressed version, type:

     cvs -z3 co -P -r GraphicsMagick-1_0 GraphicsMagick

Note that the "-r GraphicsMagick-1_0" requests the sources from the GraphicsMagick 1.0 development branch.

To update the sources within a checked out directory execute

     cvs update -P -d

and only the files which have changed will be updated.

The available modules relating to GraphicsMagick are:

  | GraphicsMagick | (core sources)
  | GraphicsMagick-NT | (everything needed for Windows)
  | GraphicsMagick-World | (everything related to GraphicsMagick)

To check out the GraphicsMagick source for NT, try this commmand line:

     cvs -z3 co -P -r GraphicsMagick-1_0 GraphicsMagick-NT

If you require a specific release of GraphicsMagick, you may check it out like

     cvs -z3 co-r GraphicsMagick-1_0_1 -P GraphicsMagick

where the "GraphicsMagick-1_0_1" is the release tag. Note that this is just an illustration. This release tag may not actually exist. You can use

      cvs status -v README.txt

from within an existing checked out directory to see what branch and release tags are available.

You can use

     cvs -z3 update -r GraphicsMagick-1_0_1

from within an existing checked out directory to move it up (or down) to that branch or release tag.

Checking out from release tag, or updating to a release tag, causes the "sticky" flag to be set on checked out files so that further update requests will only cause an update if the tag is a branch tag, and is a newer version on the branch. To clear the sticky flags and update to the most current version on the trunk, use

     cvs -z3 update -A

Once a release has been tagged, checking out using a release tag is the only reliable way to obtain release files from CVS since the default is to check out the most current sources on the requested branch, which may not be stable or released.

Using compression levels over `-z3`,may slow the CVS transfer since they require the CVS server to work much harder, yet don't compress the data much more.

CVS Software

The best place to look for the latest version of CVS is at the CVS Home Page . There is also a lot of information and documentation about CVS available.

Image manipulation software that works like magic.