CVS repository on DVD

An idea for your next show… how about selling copies of the CVS repository on CD or DVD?

At the moment the tarballs are useful, but there’s some quite complex branching/tagging going on in CVS. It would be handy to have a local copy of the repository to poke around and check out different versions. There’s quite a lot of interesting CVS logs that haven’t made it anywhere. The CVSWeb interface is a bit clumsy to access these.

Is there any way to keep an offline CVS repository updated (git style)? Perhaps just a script to go through and change all the CVS.Repository entries in a checked out copy to point to the online repository, so that ‘cvs update’ works.

Just an idea…

Good ideas. Certainly putting a copy of the cvs (and svn) repositories onto a CD/DVD would be quite possible. We’ll keep that in mind. As for a mechanism to keep an offline repository in sync with ours, that’d need a bit of thinking about. We use rsync here but that means we need to know the login details for our account on the host! Something similar which gives sandboxed read-only access would seem sensible.

There’s a package called cvsup which would be a good way to enable people to maintain local mirrors of the repository with minimal bandwidth usage, but last time I investigated it, it was difficult to install and configure and we ended up doing without. If anyone has any experience with using it, perhaps they could give us advice?

In the meantime, the CD we sold at the Midlands show included a copy of the repository.