Installing and Building CVS from Source - Administration

The Concurrent Versions System (CVS) is an open source tool that lets you manage versions of anything stored in files. If you're a software developer trying to manage different versions of the same code, you'll want to check out this three-part series. It is excerpted from chapter two of Essential CVS, Second Edition, written by Jennifer Vesperman (O'Reilly; ISBN: 0596527039). Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.

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April 10, 2008

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Download the compressed .tar file from http://cvs.nongnu.org. Decompress and unarchive the file. If you intend to keep the source after you compile it, unzip the compressed .tar file into /usr/src/cvs. Otherwise, you can decompress and unarchive it into /tmp. Next, cd into the cvs directory, read the INSTALL and README files, and run the commands there. I recommend that novice users disable automake and autoconf. (In CVS 1.12.1 and later, autoconf and automake are disabled by default.)

You should compile CVS as a user without superuser privileges (for security), but you must have superuser privileges when installing CVS (running make install) for everyone to use. If you are installing it into your own home directory for your personal use, you don’t need superuser privileges, but your choice of remote connection methods is limited.

Example 2-4 shows a sample installation from source. In this example, I decompress and unarchive the .tar file into /tmp and change directory into the top level of the resulting source tree. As I’m using a later version than 1.12.1, I don’t need to disable automake and autoconf. The next steps described in INSTALL for CVS 1.12.9 are to run the configure script provided and then, if that exits successfully, run make, switch to the root user, and run make install.

Example 2-4. Installing from source

$ ls
cvs-1.12.9.tar.bz2
$ bunzip2 cvs-1.12.9.tar.bz2
$ tar -xpf cvs-1.12.9.tar
$ cd cvs-1.12.9
$ ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
.
.
.
config.status: executing depfiles commands config.status: executing default-1 commands $ make
make all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9'
.
.
.
make[2]: Entering directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9'
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `all-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9' make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9'

$ su – root
$ make install
Making install in lib
make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9/lib'
make install-am
.
.
.
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9' make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/cvs-1.12.9'

Please check back next week for the continuation of this article.