KDE Repository

The KDE CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is the source code repository for the KDE project. You can access it via

Methods (i), (iii), and (iv) are read-only methods and are available to the public. Methods (ii) and (v) allow either read-only or read-write access to the CVS repository depending on your setup.

The web page for method (i) explains its usage. For method (iii), please see http://developer.kde.org/source/anonsvn.html.

The snapshots, (iv), are .tar.bz2 files which contain a section of KDE code (called a "module"; ex, kdelibs, kdeutils) as it looked on some specified day (specified in the filename: ex, kdelibs990517.tar.bz2). The snapshots are posted daily in ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/snapshots. [ (ii) is described below. ]

The repository (or, just "CVS") stores all of the changes made to the source code by all of the contributors so that changes may be undone. Each time a user makes a change (s)he includes a comment so that the devlopment of code can be more easily followed. These comments are sent to the kde-commits mailing list. CVS can be tagged at any time so that the current state can be later recalled. Also, the CVS may branch off into different lines of development; the branches start at the tag points. The branch tagged "HEAD" is used for regular development of the next version of KDE. Near release times the CVS is tagged with different names to help organize the release. The last tag as of this writing was KDE_3_1_BRANCH.

Access through the svn command line utility (ii) and the graphical svn frontends (v) are explained in more detail in the next section.