Re: ext connections

[Eric Siegerman]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 10:17:37PM -0800, Rob Helmer wrote:
> Can someone tell me what CVS actually does when you use
> SSH or RSH with CVS ( with a $CVSROOT like :ext:address@hidden:cvsroot )?

One of CVS's subcommands (a peer of "update", "tag", etc.) is
"server", which tells the cvs process to become a server, i.e. to:
  - start speaking (the server side of) the cvs client/server
    protocol over its stdin and stdout

  - perform whichever "real" CVS operation is requested by the
    client (or maybe that's "operations", plural...)

The client:
  - starts up a server process, by running the following shell
    command, more or less:
        $CVS_RSH [-l $user] $host $CVS_SERVER server
    having set up pipes between itself and the subprocess's stdin
    and stdout.  (The $CVS_* things are of course the environment
    variables; $host and $user are extracted from the CVSROOT,
    however the latter was provided)

  - begins speaking (the client side of) the cvs protocol over
    the pipes

It's the server process which accesses the repo, and the client
which accesses the sandbox.

--

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|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
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