[Python-Dev] CVS and SSH under windows.

[Mark Hammond]

[David]
> No, please, drop us all a line online!

OK - here it is, for what it is worth.  You will notice that I spent the
time to research my facts carefully before giving out this information
(NOT!)

Sure.  It is a bit of a PITA (surprise, surprise, surprise):

First, get the latest WinCVS.  Has some nice new features.  Mine shows as
1.1b13.  It has a slightly “slicker” more windowsy look than the older one.
What we really want is the version with the Options/Preferences dialog that
allows you to supply the “RAS identity” file when you select “SSH Server”
as the auth method.  Previous versions allow you to select the SSH Server,
but give you nowhere to put the identity file.  Hence previous versions
used a batch file wrapper, which you probably saw reference to.  This
version makes it much simpler.

I use the standard SSH Version 1.2.14 binary set.  I cant recall the URL,
but it is quite small and only a few binary files.  “ssh” shows usage -
“ssh -v” shows versbose usage, “verbose” in this context apparently means
showing the version number (took me ages to work that one out :-)

There were only a few files, so I just dumped them all in the same
directory as the CVS binaries.

You then need to make a “key” file - I cant recall the exact process, but
it is pretty simple.  This is creating the identify file you specify to
WinCVS, as well as the public key you upload to source-force.

NOTE - from memory, you MUST have a HOME env var set, and you MUST have a
“.ssh” directory under your home.  Otherwise you get cryptic errors from
SSH that give no clue that this is the problem.

After uploading the public key to source forge, you are nearly set.  The
last step is convinving CVS that you want to use this new SSH setting, and
not the setting CVS so kindly persists in its “CVS\Root” files.  The only
way I found to do this was to either edit the Root files manually, or
remove the directories locally and force CVS to re-create them (and thereby
re-pull everything - I assume you have ADSL in that hotel room :-)
Alternatively, dig up that CVS script posted to py-dev recently and change
it - personally, I never trusted it :-)

All my root files look like:
:ext:mhammond@cvs.python.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/python

Yours almost certainly will be setup for anon access, not using ssh.

Hope that makes sense.  Im happy to chase anything else up I can for you...

Mark.