Can drush (drupal) do CVS checkout?

Question

I'm using drush, which supposedly can be used instead of a cvs program to checkout from the drupal repository.

All tutorials I've found don't mention drush, instead they start with cvs.

cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:[email protected]:/cvs/drupal checkout -d cms -r DRUPAL-6 drupal

• How do I change this command so it's compatible with drush?
• and do I still need a CVS software? Since I'm not checking out with CVS, I'm guessing I don't anymore. I'd rather not install a CVS program on my windows machine since I don't use it version control.

Answer 1

You cannot make a CVS checkout with drush, IIRC. But what you can do, is that you can download a tagged version with drush that is otherwise not available. So you can use drush do download a specific version of a module.

CVS is only needed if you want to contribute patches back to the module.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if you can get Drupal itself via CVS with drush, but you can use drush to checkout modules and themes from CVS. You have to specify the package handler either in your drushrc file or as an option in the drush command directly.

add the following line to your drushrc.php file: $options['package-handler'] = 'cvs';

OR, at the command line use (this example is checking out the backup_migrate module):

drush -v dl backup_migrate --package-handler=cvs

See here for more details: http://drupal.org/node/477684

Now, drush on Windows is another issue altogether. IIRC, it's not supported so it'll probably be more headache than it's worth. I'm sure drush doesn't include its own CVS client so you'll certainly still need to get a CVS client configured on your machine.

Answer 3

Add the following lines in your /etc/bash.bashrc (or ~/.bashrc) file and all your drush downloads will be handled by CVS.

alias drush='drush -v --package-handler=cvs'

You simply type drush on your command line as before.