Re: [Savannah-hackers] CVS little-known feature

[Vincent Caron]

Penelope Fudd wrote:
> It turns out that you don't have to do the 'cvs login' command, because
> you can specify the password in the 'cvs co' command.

This part of the documentation is really old, I think it's even copied 
from the original Cederqvist CVS manual. I believe it's meant to stress 
the fact that with pserver you only login once and then checkout/update 
many times (password is stored for you in ~/.cvspass forever).


> Right after the username, if you put an extra colon, you can then insert
> the password.  In the case of savannah, the password is blank for
> anoncvs, so the resulting command is:
>
> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs:@subversions.gnu.org:/webcvs co software/grub
>                               ^extra colon
>
> Since it doesn't ask for a password, it's useful for scripts and such.

The rule of thumb is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" :). I mean that 
most people can do anonymous checkout easily with this documentation and 
it is sort of 'normalized' (talk about an habit rather). However it is 
indeed useful for scripts. For our information, could you verify if this 
syntax has been supported for a long time by CVS ? Thanks !