Question

I have a Backup Directory of a Project that was managed in CVS.

How can I extract it so that the files are “normal” again?
All the extensions seem to end in ,v and the files themselves have got CVS comments that render the files rather useless to me.

The original CVS Server does not exist anymore unfortunately.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you have all of the repository files, not just the ones for the project, but also the ones in the CVSROOT directory (at the same level as project directories), you could:

Restore the files into a temporary directory. No need to do so as root, a simple directory off of a normal users’ account will do.

Temporarily set your CVSROOT environment variable to point to the temporary directory.

You should then be able to perform a ‘cvs checkout’ from the repository (carefully do so in another directory). Or export, or whatever you prefer.

In fact, if you don’t need remote/multiuser access to the repo, you can even continue using the repo (with all the revision information) this way.

Something that can be confusing is that the directory specified in the CVSROOT environment variable will contain directory that happens to be named CVSROOT. There should also be a directory at the same level for each project that was stored in the repository.

So if you restored everything to ‘/home/username/restored_root’, you’d want the variable to point to ‘/home/username/restored_root’ which will have a directory named CVSROOT in it, as well as one directory for each project that was in the repository.