Cvsup

Revision as of 06:51, 18 December 2014

cvsup is the command used to synchronize the ports tree and the system source tree with the live versions at freebsd.org. cvsup stands for Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) UPdate.

Under FreeBSD, you will generally be using one of two versions of the cvsup port itself to do your synchronization; you may install /usr/ports/net/cvsup if you want to get the optional X11 GUI features, or /usr/ports/net/cvsup-without-gui if you don't plan to use X11 or otherwise don't care about the pretty windowed display (such as on a headless_server). If you choose to use the full version of cvsup, it will function precisely like the cvsup-without-gui version does if you are not running a windowing system. Please note, however, that if you don't have X installed, you do not generally want to install the full cvsup package with the gui, as it has a LOT of X-related dependencies which you utterly and completely do not need or want if you aren't running the X windowing system. cvsup also requires Modula-3 programming language dependencies.

For examples of the most common usages of the cvsup command, please see Updating the ports tree and Updating the source tree.

cvsup replacements

For easier use and simplicity, csup, portsnap, and freebsd-update, which come with the base system, and subversion (svn) are replacements for cvsup's functions. csup is a direct replacement for cvsup's ability to download source files and ports. freebsd-update can update release versions of this base system. Portsnap is a good replacement for updating ports. Subversion, from the devel category, or similar programs are options to check out other mirror repositories. For more information on subversion see: FreeBSD Handbook: Using Subversion which includes links to Apache Subversion Documentation, and the free online book Version Control with Subversion.