Essential CVS

The ext and server Access Methods

In my experience, ext is the most commonly used access method, and it is usually used with SSH. ext stands for external, which refers to an external (to CVS) rsh or remote shell program. This method uses a remote shell program to connect the sandbox client computer to the repository server computer. The server method is almost the same as the ext method. The only difference is that server uses a remote shell program that is included with CVS.

To use a program other than rsh with the ext connection method, the CVS_RSH environment variable on the client should be set to the name of the program and the directory containing the program should be in the user’s PATH on the client computer. Alternatively, you can set the CVS_RSH environment variable to the absolute path to the program, without modifying the PATH variable.

ext accepts any command line-based program that can be called with the following syntax:

program [-b] [-l username] host commands

The program must run the commands in a remote shell and pipe standard input (stdin) and standard output (stdout) without filtering the content. The -b is necessary only if the program is running on OS/2 and is used to force rsh to run in binary mode, without end-of-file conversion. The -l username is used (by CVS) only if there is a username included in the repository path.

For the ext access method, the repository path format is:

[:ext:][user@]hostname[:]/path

The user needs to have a username on both the ...