These web pages (under http://www.gnu.org/software/guile) are actually managed by CVS. This means that you can check out a copy of the web pages onto your own machine, make changes, check them with your browser, and then commit your changes atomically. The CVS server is configured to update the web server's copy of the pages automatically, whenever someone commits a change.

Please don't make a link to this page from anywhere else. I'd like people to go through me, or another Guile webmaster, to get access to this info. (Not very GNU of me, I'm afraid.)

[NOTE: Sometime during 1999, gnu.org switched to Kerberos, so the following instructions on CVS access are incorrect (or at least, incomplete). The solution is to use a kerberized CVS, which involves building a new cvs w/ configure options "--with-krb4=/athena --enable-encryption". -ttn, 2000/02/12 08:47:26]

[ another note: you should be able to use regular cvs with CVS_RSH=/your/kerberized/rsh. If this works, I'm not going to hassle myself with more
-spacey, 2000/08/01 22:55:02 ]

Checking out a working copy of the web pages

To work on the Guile web pages on the GNU server, you'll need an account on www.gnu.org. Ask Jonas Oberg <jonas@coyote.org> to create you one.

To log into the CVS server, use the command:

cvs -d :pserver:USERNAME@www.gnu.org:/home/www/cvs login

To check out a copy of the Guile pages, try this:

cvs -d :pserver:USERNAME@www.gnu.org:/home/www/cvs checkout guile

You could also simply log into www.gnu.org directly and edit the pages the server sees, but I really don't recommend it. If you ever forget to commit something, it'll be visible on the web site, but not in the CVS repository, which will be confusing for the rest of us. [ That, and interactive performance one www.gnu.org can be abysmal. -spacey ] Also, you may end up with conflicts in the web-visible files from automatic updates, when someone else commits a change to the file you were editing.

Please do write informative log entries for the changes you commit. They don't need to be too detailed (if we really want all the facts, we can just do a diff), but it would be nice to be able to get an overview by reading the logs. Eventually, I'd like to have CVS post all the log entries to a mailing list, but I haven't gotten that set up yet.

A nice way to check your pages before committing

### For testing the Guile web pages.
<VirtualHost guile-web.red-bean.com>
ServerName guile-web.red-bean.com
ServerAlias guile-web.red-bean.com guile-web
Alias /software/guile /home/jimb/guile/gnu-web/guile
DocumentRoot /home/httpd/html
ServerAdmin jimb@red-bean.com
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/guile-web.red-bean.com-error_long
TransferLog /var/log/httpd/guile-web.red-bean.com-access_log
</VirtualHost>

The CNAME isn't actually necessary, just as long as you have some web server where you can alias /software/guile (the path on the GNU site) to your working directory.

You could probably even test CGI scripts this way, too. There might be some more configury necessary, though. Send me (Jim Blandy) mail if you get it working.

Security issues

2 Aug 2000 spacey