Source code is available for every JBoss module and any version of JBoss can be built from source by downloading the appropriate version of the code from the JBoss Forge CVS Repository.
CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is an Open Source version control system that is used pervasively throughout the Open Source community. It keeps track of source changes made by groups of developers who are working on the same files and enables developers to stay in sync with each other as each individual chooses.The command line version of the CVS program is freely available for nearly every platform and is included by default on most Linux and UNIX distributions. A good port of CVS as well as numerous other UNIX programs for Win32 platforms is available from Cygwin.
The syntax of the command line version of CVS will be examined because this is common across all platforms.
For complete documentation on CVS, check out The CVS Home Page.
All JBoss projects' CVS repositories can be accessed through anonymous(pserver) CVS with the following instruction set. The module you want to check out must be specified as the modulename. When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key.
The general syntax of the command line version of CVS for anonymous access to the JBoss repositories is:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.forge.jboss.net:/cvsroot/jboss login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.forge.jboss.net:/cvsroot/jboss co modulename
The first command logs into JBoss CVS repository as an anonymous user. This command only needs to be performed once for each machine on which you use CVS because the login information will be saved in your HOME/.cvspass file or equivalent for your system. The second command checks out a copy of the modulename source code into the directory from which you run the cvs command.
To avoid having to type the long cvs command line each time, you can set up a CVSROOT environment variable.
set CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.forge.jboss.net:/cvsroot/jboss
The abbreviated versions of the previous commands can then be used:
cvs login cvs -z3 co modulename
The name of the JBoss module alias you use depends on the version of JBoss you want. For the 3.0 branch the module name is jboss-3.0, for the 3.2 branch it is jboss-3.2, and in general, for branch x.y the module name is jboss-x.y.
To checkout the HEAD revision of jboss to obtain the latest code on the main branch you would use jboss-head as the module name.
Releases of JBoss are tagged with the pattern JBoss_X_Y_Z where X is the major version, Y is the minor version and Z is the patch version. Release branches of JBoss are tagged with the pattern Branch_X_Y.
Some checkout examples are:
cvs co -r JBoss_3_2_6 jboss-3.2 # Checkout the 3.2.6 release version code cvs co jboss-head # Checkout the curent HEAD branch code