CVS

Major releases of MyNews can be downloaded as .tgz archive files. Major versions are released when a significant amount of changes has been made in the source code. Between two major releases, you can download beta versions of MyNews by using the MyNews CVS tree.

Requirements

To use the MyNews CVS tree, you need to have CVS installed on your machine. Most of the Linux distributions include CVS. For more information about CVS, see the CVS web site.

You also need to have an active Internet connection.

Getting your own MyNews anonymous CVS access

This operation will create a local directory on your machine that will contain the MyNews source code. This directory could be now synchronized with the MyNews CVS repository of SourceForge.

To create your CVS access, you must login anonymous on the CVS repository:

> cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/perlmynews login
When you are prompted a CVS password, simply press the "Enter" key.

Then, you can get the mynews directory:

> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/perlmynews co mynews

The mynews directory

The local directory created by CVS is called mynews. If you go to this directory, you will see all the files and directories contained in the major releases .tgz files. Extra "CVS" directories are used by CVS to store information about your local copy of the CVS repository.

The mynews directory contains three main subdirectories called perl, scripts and www that contain respectively the source code of the MN perl module, mynews script and MyNews web interface. The misc subdirectory is used for misc extra operations.

Using the CVS version of MyNews

The best way to use the CVS version of MyNews is to use symbolic links rather than copying files. For example, if you have downloaded the MyNews CVS sources in /home/mynews/dev/mynews, you can do:
> ln -s /home/mynews/dev/mynews/perl/lib/MN /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/MN
> ln -s /home/mynews/dev/mynews/perl/lib/MN.pm /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/MN.pm
> ln -s /home/mynews/dev/mynews/scripts/mynews /usr/bin/mynews
> ln -s /home/mynews/dev/mynews/scripts/mydoc /usr/bin/mydoc
> ln -s /home/mynews/dev/mynews/www /var/www/mynews
Note: the location of perl modules directory (/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/) depends on the version of your perl installation.

Checking for MyNews changes

To see if a new beta version of MyNews has been released, you can check the news on the Sourceforge MyNews page or the MyNews web site.

You can also use CVS. In your local mynews directory, just run:

> cvs -n update
If files have been changed in the MyNews repository, they will appear like this:
U www/index.cgi
You can see the difference by:
> cvs diff www/index.cgi
To update your code with the modified source, just run:
> cvs update


© 2004 Joël Savignon