If you’ve been using open source for a good length of time, you’ve probably needed a feature or bug fix that’s only available in the development tree of a open source project. For example, if you want to use PostgreSQL with RTG, you have to download and build the developers’ latest code. (Those exact instructions can be found in the March 2005 “Tech Support” column, located online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-03/tech_01.html/.)
Unlike stable releases, which are usually conveniently available for download as either source tarballs or binary packages, development code is often only available from a project’s source code repository. Typically, a repository is either a CVS (http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/) or Subversion (SVN, http://subversion.tigris.org/) repository.
Here, let’s see how to use CVS and SVN to access the development tree of a few notable projects.
To try CVS, let’s download the latest version of RTG and the most recent version of Mozilla Firefox. Both examples use an anonymous CVS account, which means that you can check out any code you want to, but cannot commit any changes.
First, let’s check out the latest version of RTG. To do that, type:
When prompted for a password, just hit Enter. The –z3 parameter causes files to be compressed while in transit. (While –z3 is usually optimal, –z9 offers a logarithmic improvement in compression at an exponential cost in CPU time.)
As you can see, RTG is hosted on…
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