CVS meet Enscript

Last night, I was installing CVS on my Debian box. Actually, it was already installed: the CVSROOT was ready to go and the service itself had been listening since the early days. However, I never finished assigning rights to myself, so, with that done and by adding myself to the cvs group, I was finally able to check in my latest Helios sources using WinCVS (I despise TortoiseCVS¹).

For work, I had once added viewcvs to the CVS repository engine: Viewcvs allows developers to view the repository via a webserver. Easy as is: During its install (apt-get install viewcvs), I ran into the normal installation checks and changes for this specific script: Most of them can be resolved by Debian’s viewcvs installer but (as usual) you should prepare yourself for some old-handy typework. The first action on your list is to add a couple of Aliases to Apache’s httpd.conf file (in my case I was only interested in one, the viewcvs ‘docroot’ parameter: I don’t like graphics²).

 Alias /viewcvs/ /usr/share/viewcvs/

The next step is to set the ‘docroot’ and ‘icons’ folder parameters in the viewcvs.conf file (/etc/viewcvs/): these folders refer to the folderstructure on the webserver and not to the physical folder structure on your Linux system (hint: check Alias). After this, you can set the use_cvsgraph and use_enscript variables in that same file to 1.

Enscript is a ‘source code highlighter’, but (obviously) it doesn’t come with a state file for C#: I found a good one at Adam Milazzo’s (Thanks Adam). This file should be copied to the enscript states directory (on Debian that is at /usr/share/enscript/hl). Also, you will have to make a couple of changes to the enscript.st file (which is in the same directory): add the csharp highlighter to the namerules section. The final step that needs to be undertaken is a change to the viewcvs.py file (you generally should be able to find this at or around /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/viewcvs/). Look for the enscript_extensions section. Notice the comment that one of the programmer left behind, just right above that extensions section:

### this sucks… we have to duplicate the extensions defined by enscript

You wouldn’t say.