Anonymous CVS

1. You will need a local copy of CVS (Concurrent Version Control System), which you can get from http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/ (the official site with the latest version) or any GNU software archive site (often somewhat outdated). Many systems have a recent version of cvs installed by default.

2. Do an initial login to the CVS server:

   cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.postgresql.org:/projects/cvsroot login

   You will be prompted for a password; you can enter anything except an empty string.

   You should only need to do this once, since the password will be saved in .cvspass in your home directory.

3. Fetch the PostgreSQL sources:

   cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.postgresql.org:/projects/cvsroot co -P pgsql

   This installs the PostgreSQL sources into a subdirectory pgsql of the directory you are currently in.

   Note: If you have a fast link to the Internet, you may not need -z3, which instructs CVS to use gzip compression for transferred data. But on a modem-speed link, it's a very substantial win.

   This initial checkout is a little slower than simply downloading a tar.gz file; expect it to take 40 minutes or so if you have a 28.8K modem. The advantage of CVS doesn't show up until you want to update the file set later on.

4. Whenever you want to update to the latest CVS sources, cd into the pgsql subdirectory, and issue

   cvs -z3 update -d -P

   This will fetch only the changes since the last time you updated. You can update in just a couple of minutes, typically, even over a modem-speed line.

5. You can save yourself some typing by making a file .cvsrc in your home directory that contains

   cvs -z3
   update -d -P

   This supplies the -z3 option to all cvs commands, and the -d and -P options to cvs update. Then you just have to say

   cvs update

   to update your files.