The ImageMagick source is available via anonymous CVS. This is a convenient way for developers from around the country or world to download the ImageMagick source, fix bugs, or add new features.

What is CVS

  CVS is the Concurent Version System and is a very popular mean of version control for software projects. It is designed to allow multiple authors to be able to simultanously operate on the same source tree. This source tree is centrally maintained, but each developer has a local mirror of this repository that they make their changes to.

CVS Command Summary

  Here is a summary of CVS commands. See Cyclic Software for detailed information and documentation about CVS.

Action | Result
add | Add a new file or directory to the repository.
get | Make a working directory of source files for editing.
commit | Apply changes to the source repository (write access)
diff | Show differences between local files and the source repository.
history | Show reports on cvs commands against the source repository.
log | Display CVS log information.
rdiff | Prepare a collection of differences reflecting changes between release.
status | Show current status of files in the repository and local copies.
update | Bring your working directory up to date with the repository.

Using Anonymous CVS

  The source tree for ImageMagick is stored on `cvs.imagemagick.org`. To access the tree you need to first set up your CVSROOT enviroment variable so that cvs knows where to go to grab the source from. The proper value for CVSROOT is:

        :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/pathos/cvs

For example, in tcsh do:

        setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/pathos/cvs

In a bourne shell descendant (e.g. bash) the following syntax has to be used

        export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/pathos/cvs'

Or whatever the approriate syntax for your shell of choice is.

Alternatively, you can specify the cvs root directly on the command line:

        cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/pathos/cvs

Next, the first time the source tree is checked out, a cvs login is needed.

        cvs login

This will ask you for a password. The password is anonymous. Enter it and press a carriage return.

To get the tree and place it in a sub-directory of your current working directory, issue the command:

        cvs co -P ImageMagick

Or to save bandwidth get the compressed version, type:

        cvs -z3 co -P ImageMagick

To update the sources within a checked out directory execute

        cvs update -P -d

and only the files which have changed will be updated.

The available modules relating to ImageMagick are:

  ImageMagick (core sources)
  ImageMagick-NT (everything needed for Windows)
  ImageMagick-World (everything related to ImageMagick)

To check out the ImageMagick source for NT, try this commmand line:

        cvs -z3 co -P ImageMagick-NT

The anoncvs tree is only updated once a day or so, so constantly updating is useless and only puts unneeded load on the already overloaded cvs server. Also, please do not use compression levels over `-z3`, the amount of bandwidth it saves is minimal while putting a much larger load on the cvs server.

CVS Software

  The best place to look for the latest version of CVS is at Cyclic Software. There is also a lot of infomation and documentation about CVS available.

Image manipulation software that works like magic.