Questions on using Capistrano with CVS

Rails
1

Today I managed to deploy my application using Capistrano, using CVS as
the SCM, but I had to use some workarounds I’m not quite happy about.
Maybe I just did something wrong, maybe these are missing features/bugs
in Capistrano:

  1. I used Capistrano earlier with SVN, and there it re-used the password
    for the remote server for doing the checkout. However, CVS kept
    complaining the access was attempted with an “empty password”,
    apparently not re-using the password. In the end, I set up my
    CVS-account with an empty password, and it worked, but I would really
    prefer having an account with password.
  2. The CVS checkout is done with -D and a revision date. However, this
    date is last revision date of my application, and therefore CVS doesn’t
    actually checkout any files. I worked around this by removing this
    argument from the code, but I have the feeling this is not right.

Any suggestions to what I may be doing wrong are appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeroen Heijmans

2

Jeroen,

For the record, I don’t use CVS and so the CVS module (being written
by me) is almost certainly not right. I would appreciate any patches
to make it work as smoothly as the SVN module.

  • Jamis
3

Never used Capistrano… From what I understand about your problem it
looks like one I already encountered (with Maven for example).
As far as i can remember, CVS can store usernames/passwords in a crypted
file on your computer. If you do so, CVS don’t ask for a password
anymore
if it can read it from this file.
I haven’t used it for a long time but i think this file is named
“.cvspass” and you can generate it with a “cvs login” command. This file
is usually in your HOME directory.

HTH.

Stéphane Thibaudeau.

4

Stéphane:

I haven’t used it for a long time but i think this file is named
“.cvspass” and you can generate it with a “cvs login” command. This file
is usually in your HOME directory.

You are right, this method also works (in fact I tried it already before
posting), but a (minor) disadvantage is that you’ll have to use cvs
login on the target machien before being able to deploy. It might be
possible to do this using Capistrano, of course.

Jamis:

For the record, I don’t use CVS and so the CVS module (being written
by me) is almost certainly not right. I would appreciate any patches
to make it work as smoothly as the SVN module.

Yes, I understood as much when searching the web for answers. I’ll
certainly let you know if I find better ways to use CVS from Capistrano.