RISC OS  OPEN

CVS access

Much of the source code available from ROOL is held in a CVS repository.

Source code to individual RISC OS components (modules or applications) is self-contained, so when you are working on just one of them, it is common to check it out individually, rather then check out the entire source tree. Checking out the entire tree uses a lot of bandwidth. If you wish to check out the whole tree or a large portion of it, please consider donating. Grab a tarball in preference to checking out with CVS, unless you absolutely must have specific revisions or are only interested in a small amount of the source. If you need to use CVS, please use the -z9 switch to ensure that the link to the server is compressed.

The complete CVS repository can be accessed read-only at

:pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot

Use an empty password if you are asked for one.

For example:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot login
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot co castle/RiscOS/Sources/Apps/Edit
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot log castle/RiscOS/Sources/Apps/Edit/VersionNum
cvs -z9 -d :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot update -r Edit-1_55 castle/RiscOS/Sources/Apps/Edit

To avoid having to use the lengthy -d switch to your CVS commands, it is convenient to set the environment variable CVSROOT to specify the repository to use. You may also wish to set it up automatically in an Obey file under RISC OS or in your shell rc file under Unix-like systems.

Under RISC OS:

* set CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot

Under Bourne shell and derivatives (sh, bash, ksh):

$ CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot
$ export CVSROOT

Under C-shell and derivates (csh, tcsh):

% setenv CVROOT :pserver:anonymous@riscosopen.org:/home/rool/cvsroot

If you are interested in volunteering to coordinate source code submissions for a particular component, please get in touch so that we can arrange write access to the repository for you.

Obtaining a CVS client

CVS is available as a package for most Unix-like systems – Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Windows (using Cygwin) – or you can compile it from source. You will get a warning about your .cvspass file the first time you do a cvs login; this is normal.

John Tytgat has done a RISC OS port of the command line CVS program. There is also an accompanying GUI frontend. The first time you run this version of CVS using pserver, you will need to do the following:

* cdir <Choices$Write>.CVS
* create <Choices$Write>.CVS./cvspass

The source code in the repository is arranged in subdirectories instead of using filename extensions, for historical reasons. To prevent the RISC OS CVS client attempting to map directory.c.file back to directory/file.c you need to do

* set UnixEnv$cvs$sfix ""

There is an alternative CVS port for RISC OS by Maarten Bezemer, but this link has been dead for some time. Try archive.org, or if you know where this now lives, please contact us.