Curiosity is bliss

AnonCVS access to cvs.monstuff.com

After going through my access and activity logs and noticed some people search for a cvs access to my repository. It definitely is more convenient than cvsweb when downloading a whole project.

The commands that should provide you access:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.monstuff.com:/home/cvs/ login (and enter a blank password)
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.monstuff.com:/home/cvs/ checkout <project>

You can find the list of projects here.
Let me know if you have any trouble accessing it, by leaving a comment below.

I must say setting up pserver was a bit of a pain. The "passwd" configuration was easy, but then I ran into a problem with some environment variables, which was hard to debug because the service runs in its own context.
Also, I didn't figure out how to restrict the anonymous user's access right away. It turns out the "readers" file in the CVSROOT directory allows that.
Also, since the anonymous user isn't a system user, the "passwd" file in CVSROOT is used to have the process impersonate a real system user.

Source Control
While on this topic, here are a couple interesting links about source control.
An explanation of the features a repository may support, in this case based on SourceGear's Vault.

A SubVersion design document, that explains the data model for the repository and provides a great overview of SubVersion's architecture.

A rather mysterious repository arch / larch that appears to be quite feature-rich, but I didn't get the time to play with yet. It used to be implemented with shell script, but a C version was more recently developed.