We are going to use the facilities provided by the great Freemind open source project. Like many other open source project Freemind uses the resources provided by Sourceforge amongst which it's CVS server which is used to provide versioning, contributor and changes tracking.
You can browse this CVS server tree for Freemind (remember that the web view is not updated in real time) by clicking here and by navigating a little I can show you some the screen about a previous document I wrote:
In the picture you can see that we are in the freemind/admin/docs/compile/windows "folder" of CVS that contains an "images" subfolder and some HTML files. Of the files you have a revision number (like 1.1 or 1.2) and how many days ago it was uploaded (commited) to the CVS server followed by the username of the uploader and a comment.
In the following shot you see my Eclipse program in the CVS perspective . You can tell it as in the leftmost bar you can see a little CVS icon selected. When you start Eclipse you might not have this perspective in the leftmost toolbar. If you need to add it click on the Open a perspective button (topmost icon in the leftmost toolbar with a little plus sign on it) and choose CVS Repository Exploring as the perspective you want to add.
In the previous image you will see that my CVS perspective already lists two different entries since I already started working with CVS.
To create a new CVS entry just right click in the CVS Repositories pane (white background in the previous picture) choose New and Repository Location and you will get a panel in which we will enter the needed values.
You will see the values in the following picture which has been obtained by right clicking on the first entry in my CVS panel and selecting Properties:
From this picture you will gather that:
Fill the needed data, click on finish and you will have your CVS entry in the pane. Now by clicking on the new CVS entry we have just created you will make Eclipse connecting to the CVS server and retrieving it's contents much like the usual local filesystem hierarchy of files and folders.
Remember that your network must permit an outbound SSH connection to cvs.sourceforge.net and that if you do not succeed you should check any personal or network firewalling rules (or ask your friendly network administrator).
If we click on the CVS entry we have just created it will unfold. You will see a HEAD entry. Expand it and also expand "admin", "docs" and "Using CVS via Eclipse".
At a given point in time here is what you could see (you will surely see something different but it is not important):
The Using CVS via Eclipse is the subtree of the Freemind project we are interested in for this document and that we are going to download on our local workstation.
Right click on this entry and choose "Check Out As ..." , select the "Check out as a project in the workspace" radio button, accept or tailor the Project name, click on the Next button.
In this panel I prefer to deselect the Use default workspace location check box and enter a folder outside of Eclipse's workspace directory and into one of my data directories.
Click on finish.
If all works as advertised you will see a small yellow rolling icon in Eclipse's lower left corner while all files from the CVS are transferred (downloaded, updated) to your local workstation.
When this is over switch to the resource perspective (usually the icon just below the "Open a perspective" button in the leftmost column and you will see the view depicting the local files on your workstation which have just been downloaded from CVS.
Now each modification on these files will touch the files on your local workstation and in the next chapter we will use the example of modifying them with the Dreamweaver web authoring application.
Copyright © 2003Robert Alexander - bob at ngi.it
