Anonymous CVS Access for the ISC DHCP Distribution

The ISC DHCP distribution can be accessed using "anonymous" CVS.
"Anonymous" cvs uses the CVS "pserver" mechanism to allow anybody on
the Internet to access a CVS repository without having to register in
any way.   Anonymous CVS allows you to access changes as soon as the
DHCP developers commit them, rather than having to wait for the next
snapshot or patchlevel.   Changes that have not yet been released yet
are not guaranteed to work, but they can nonetheless be useful in many
cases.

			  TABLE OF CONTENTS

		1. What is anonymous CVS?
		2. How can i start using it?
		3. Checking out the latest code in a release
		4. Checking out the latest code
		5. Checking out a specific release
		6. When to update

			WHAT IS ANONYMOUS CVS?

Anonymous CVS also allows you to browse through the history of the
DHCP distribution, and examine the revision history of specific files
to see how they have changed between revisions, to try to figure out
why something that was working before is no longer working, or just to
see when a certain change was made.

		      HOW CAN I START USING IT?

To use anonymous CVS to access the DHCP distribution, you must first
"log in".   You should only need to do this once, but it is a
necessary step, even though access is anonymous.   Anonymous users log
in as user "nobody", password "nobody".   To do this, type:

	cvs -d :pserver:nobody@dhcp.cvs.isc.org:/cvsroot login

You will be prompted for a password - type "nobody".   If you get some
kind of error indicating that cvs doesn't know how to log you in, you
are probably running an old version of cvs, and should upgrade.   This
should work with cvs version 1.10.

Once you have logged in, you can check out a version of the DHCP
distribution, so the next question is, which version?

	      CHECKING OUT THE LATEST CODE IN A RELEASE

There are currently four major versions of the distribution - Release
1, Release 2, Release 3, and the current development tree.   Releases
1, 2 and 3 are branches in the CVS repository.   To check out the
latest code on any of these branches, you would use a branch tag of
RELEASE_1, RELEASE_2 or RELEASE_3 in the following command:

	(setenv CVSROOT :pserver:nobody@dhcp.cvs.isc.org:/cvsroot;
	 cvs checkout -d dhcp-2.0 -r RELEASE_2 DHCP)

Note that the example is for Release 2.

		     CHECKING OUT THE LATEST CODE

To check out the current engineering version, use:

	(setenv CVSROOT :pserver:nobody@dhcp.cvs.isc.org:/cvsroot;
	 cvs checkout -d dhcp-current DHCP)

Note that the current engineering version is a work in progress, and
there is no real guarantee that it will work for you.

		   CHECKING OUT A SPECIFIC RELEASE

You can also check out specific versions of the DHCP distribution.
There are three kinds of version tags you may find - alpha tags, beta
tags and release tags.   Alpha tags look like this:

	V#-ALPHA-YYYYMMDD

# is the release number.   YYYYMMDD is the date of the release, with a
4-digit year, the month expressed as a number (January=1), and the day
of the month specified as a number, with the first day of the month
being 1.

Beta tags look like this:

	V#-BETA-%-PATCH-*

Where # is the release number, % is the Beta number (usually 1) and *
is the patchlevel.   In the future there may also be beta tags that
look like this:

	V#-#-BETA-%-PATCH-*

Where #-# is the major version followed by the minor version - for
example, when the first 3.1 beta comes out, the tag will look like
this:

	V3-1-BETA-1-PATCH-0

Release tags look like this:

	V#-%-*

Where # is the major version, % is the minor version, and * is the
patchlevel.   So the tag for 1.0pl2 is V1-0-2, and to check it out,
you'd type:

	(setenv CVSROOT :pserver:nobody@dhcp.cvs.isc.org:/cvsroot;
	 cvs checkout -d dhcp-1.0pl2 -rV1-0-2 DHCP)

Whenever changes are checked in to the ISC DHCP repository, or files
are tagged, a notice is sent to the dhcp-source-changes@isc.org
mailing list.   You can subscribe to this list by sending mail to
dhcp-source-changes-request@isc.org, and you will then get immediate
notification when changes are made.   You may find the volume of mail
on this list annoying, however.

			    WHEN TO UPDATE

We do not recommend that you do an update immediately after you see a
change on the dhcp-source-changes mailing list - instead, it's best to
wait a while to make sure that any changes that change depends on have
also been committed.   Also, sometimes when development is being done
on two machines, the developers will check in a tentative change that
hasn't been tested at all so that they can update on a different
machine and test the change.   The best way to avoid accidentally
getting one of these changes is to not update aggressively - when a
change is made, wait a while before updating, to make sure that it's
not going to be quickly followed by another change.