I don't know the first thing about CVS...

[deanrantala]

Heres my problem:

There is this program I need to install (winex) and it is available only via "CVS". Now I understand somewhat the concept of CVS, but don't have a clue as to how I download from them, what I type, or how to install in this fasion. I blew nearly an hour searching for howto's on this and got nothing on my search results but software that is available from cvs.( that would be nice if I knew how it is used). Someone please tell me....
1)How do I comunicate with this cvs deal from the command line.

2)How do I know what commands to give this cvs deal for different software?

3)where will it download the file to? does it automatically install it also?

Everyone talks about this darn thing, it is supposed to be so nice, why is documentation so scarce and hard to find on the web?

[AdaHacker]

There's actually plenty of documentation on the CVS web site. It's just not the kind of documentation you're looking for. CVS is a tool for developers, not end users, and the documentation is written with that in mind. In answer to your questions:

1) CVS has many commands. You issue them by running commands of the form
'cvs -d cvsroot_directory command_name arguments'
In your case, the particular command you want it 'checkout', which will get you the current version of the source tree you're interested in. So, the command you want probably looks something like this:
cvs -d user@server:/path/to/cvsroot checkout module_name
The exact command will depend on the site you're trying to get the code from.

2) Since you just want to download the code, you probably won't need any commands other than checkout.

3) When you run a checkout command, CVS will create a subdirectory for the code within your current directory. And, no, it will not install automatically. CVS is a source code control system, not a tool for downloading source distributions. I doubt very much that any developer would want it to attempt an automatic installation.

[deanrantala]

you probably don't realize how much light this has shed for me. Thanks - at least I now know what information I'm looking for...:)

[serz]

I think that this will help you a lot.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cvs/index.html?CMP=IL7015

It's a sample of the book (Essential CVS), this sample covers the basics of CVS.

Later.

[DragonHead]

http://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.11.6/cvs.html