Installing CVS on Linux

Squashua

I'm not formally educated with Linux and I never pretended to be.

I've been asked to install CVS on Linux. Fine, I can follow directions, I've read the wiki, etc. ad nauseum.

It's just I don't know which version I need to use. I'm going to use the STABLE version, but I don't know my idiosynchricies between systems:

Installing on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (i586)
2.616.21-0.8-default i686

Which CVS download do I pick (obviously a x86 one, correct?)

[DIR] hppa-hpux/
[DIR] mips-irix/
[DIR] powerpc-aix/
[DIR] sparc-sunos/
[DIR] x86-bsdos/
[DIR] x86-sunos/
[DIR] x86-woe/

I'm generally very good with these sorts of things, but lack of specific knowledge just makes me feel stupid. Then-again, how am I ever going to learn without asking?

ecco the dolphin

You might want to try either installing CVS through SUSE's package management system, or through the source (as opposed to the binaries that you're trying to grab).

If you do it through the package management system, chances are good that the directories used by CVS will already be set up neatly for your system (e.g. where the final binary is put, where the configuration files are, etc). If you do it through source, you can configure it so it the relevant directories match your system's directories as well.

Plus, there may not be a CVS binary for Linux (at least, from the GNU site). There are a lot of versions of Linux out there with a lot of different libraries... it's not easy to create a dynamically linked application that works with all of them.

Squashua

If by package management you mean the list that shows up when I go through

system -> configuration -> install software

CVS isn't listed as one of the hundreds of options.
Neither is cvs or concurrent versions etc.

I may have to compile from source:
Is this a good guide?

vonPoonBurGer

Well, I have no idea who WestHost is, or what distro they're running, so I can't say if that info is applicable to your situation. I found this forum post which appears to be SuSE-specific, and may help on the nuts 'n bolts:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2002-Jun/1416.html

When he says "install the CVS package", I'm not sure if he means from source, or from an RPM. I'm guessing from source. But man, that's a lot of manual effort. Incidentally, this is why I like Debian, where installing CVS is usually just a matter of running apt-get install cvs.

Squashua

Yeah, that's not a helpful post from that guy.

I found this place from a Suse10 forum:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.0/RPMS/i686

Located CVS on it. An RPM - that should just install itself then?

Janin

Looking at wiki, Suse seems to have something called YaST to install packages with. Every other distibution I know of has CVS in the official repositories (available packages), so this YaST thing should be able to find and install cvs.

Squashua

Heh.

Me so stupid.

The latest unstable release - 1 iteration was already installed on machine.

I didnt know it b/c I went to INSTALL and cvs wasnt listed.
I typed in CVS at prompt and help for cvs showed up

I went to UNINSTALL APPS and found the version

So the morale is to always check both install and uninstall before proceeding.



Now the question is; how do I upgrade to the latest non-stable release? :-)

vonPoonBurGer

Squashua wrote:

Now the question is; how do I upgrade to the latest non-stable release? :-)

YaST looks like it does something very similar to Debian's apt. I'd recommend going over the YaST user docs first off. It looks to me like you'll want to configure an "online update" server. There's probably one already there, but I doubt they link YaST to the bleeding-edge non-stable updates by default. You'll then probably need to pull an updated package list from that server. Assuming there's a newer version available, it's probably just a matter of right-clicking and saying "upgrade".

From reading the docs it looks like you might have to upgrade the SuSE base to bleeding edge nonstable before you can do the same to CVS. If that's something you'd rather avoid, you might want to see if there's a way to get CVS and its dependencies from the nonstable updates server, while leaving the rest of the system pulling updates from the stable server. Debian's apt refers to this as "pinning", I imagine YaST might have some similar capability. Try running online_update -h, see if there's some advanced options along those lines in the command-line version of the tool. Or, if you're comfortable running the nonstable version, heck just go for it. I know Debian's got three levels, stable, testing and unstable, and I have to say, a lot of the time unstable really isn't!

Squashua

I'm uninstlaling the unstable and installing the stable; we'll see how that works; YaST will handle it; hopefully that means it'll handle the dependencies too.