The Vim CVS repository

Vim, like many open source projects, is distributed with the aid of the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS). CVS allows developers to maintain a single, controlled source tree with multiple check-outs of individual files.

If you don't know how to use CVS, you'll probably want to look at the official guides. It's a powerful, but complicated piece of software.

Browsing the Vim sources

You can browse the CVS online at SourceForge. This shows the most recent version of the files, both the released version "vim" and the development version "vim7". You can view diffs to find out what the latest changes are.

Documentation on accessing it via pserver or ssh can be found on the SourceForge project page.

Obtaining Vim through CVS

SourceForge sometimes has problems with the CVS server. You might want to use Subversion instead.

These are the simple instructions how to obtain the Vim files through CVS. Use this when you have a reasonable fast internet connection and want to compile Vim yourself. It should work well on any system that supports CVS.

Note: The CVS repository is regularly, but not immediately. Vim's CVS repository may be a few days behind the head of development. For information on patching Vim with the most up-to-date patches, consult the information on patches

Doing it for the first time

Go to a directory where you want the Vim source tree to appear. Use this command (it is one line):

      cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@vim.cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/vim checkout vim7

This will create the "vim7" directory and download all the Vim files and subdirectories into it. It should also work when you are behind a firewall, because it uses port 80. It probably doesn't work with a proxy though.
Read the "vim7/README.txt" file for how to compile Vim. For Unix it's simply "cd vim7/src; make".

Updating

Recent patches appear in CVS all the time. Change into the "vim7" directory and include the changes with this single command:

      cvs -z3 update

You will get messages for all directories that are inspected and files that are being updated.


Obtaining Vim through CVS with Aap

Aap is a new tool that does all the work of downloading for you. You download one file, called a recipe, and "aap install" does all the work. To later update to the latest version of Vim you do not need to download anything manually or type the CVS root URL, just use the command "aap update".

The detailed explanation can be found here. Please report problems to Bram AT a-a-p.org.