The LDP is in the process of providing CVS access to authors. There are a few good reasons for using CVS:
If you're completely new to CVS, there are a few web pages you may want to look at which can help you out:
First you'll need to get an account at the LDP's CVS Repository. This is pretty much the root directory that is used by CVS, with various projects (HOWTOs, mini HOWTOs, etc.) created as subdirectories of that.
You'll need to create a hashed password and userid for your account. The hashed password allows you to send an encrypted password to the CVS group without them needing to know your password. You can do this with the following command, from bash (or sh):
$ echo put_your_password_here | perl -e "print crypt(<>, join '',('.', '/', 0..9, 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z')[rand 64, rand 64]),\"\n\""
Take the output of this command, and send it with your proposed userid to cvsadmin@cvslist.linuxdoc.org. Your unique CVSROOT will be created and you'll get an e-mail with a response.
When you get your response, log into your CVSROOT and make sure everything is set up properly:
$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:your_userid@cvs.linuxdoc.org:/cvsroot $ cvs -d $CVSROOT login
(Replace the CVSROOT with what you were sent in the response e-mail).
You'll be asked for your password, and then given access to the CVS Repository in read-write mode. Once you've used cvs login once and have been given access to the system, your password is stored in .cvsroot and you will not have to use cvs login again. Just set the CVSROOT and continue on. You can get the entire linuxdoc repository with this command:
$ cvs get LDP
Or you can get the SGML source for your own document with these commands:
$ cvs get howto/YOUR-HOWTO.sgml $ cvs get minihowto/YOURDOC.sgml
Also available is The Commit List, which is an e-mail sent for each change anywhere in the repository. Note that this is a high-volume list. You can subscribe by sending an empty e-mail to commits-subscribe@cvslist.linuxdoc.org. You can unsubscribe by sending an empty e-mail to commits-unsubscribe@cvslist.linuxdoc.org.
Anonymous CVS access (read-only) is available:
$ cvs -d :pserver:cvs@anoncvs.linuxdoc.org:/cvsroot login
As a password, use cvs. You can then get linuxdoc modules as above. Note that changes to the anoncvs site may be a half an hour behind the main site.
You can access the CVS repository via the web at http://cvsweb.linuxdoc.org/index.cgi/linuxdoc.
There are graphical interfaces to CVS, and you can get a list of them at http://freshmeat.net/appindex/. Search for CVS.
CVS has a special tag that you can use to automatically insert the date and version directly into the document. This is called $Id$. By including this tag in (for example) your <date> tag, you can have that automatically change each time you change the file, allowing the revision mark to increment each time.
When you're ready to upload changes to the CVS server, use the command
cvs ci -m "comment" YOUR-HOWTO.sgml
. The -m "comment"
isn't necessary, but if you don't include it, you'll be brought into the
editor (usually vi, or whatever your EDITOR environment varialbe is) and
be given the chance to add a comment about the changes.
You can follow more of the CVS discussion on the ldp-discuss list. For the time being, LDP submissions should still be sent to ldp-submit.