ViewCVS: Repository Browsing

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ViewCVS Users Group

The History of ViewCVS

The ViewCVS software was inspired by cvsweb (originally written by Bill Fenner and then further developed by Henner Zeller). Greg Stein wanted to make some changes and updates, but cvsweb was implemented in Perl. He wrote:

"While I can manage some Perl, cvsweb was rather unmaintainable for me. So I undertook the task to convert the software to Python. As a result, I've actually been able to go way beyond the simple changes that I had envisioned."

So ViewCVS started out as just a port of the cvsweb script. Along the way, it has had numerous cleanups and other modifications, a process simplified by the elegance of the Python language.

In 2001, the project was moved to SourceForge, a popular software collaboration environment. Today, ViewCVS is being developed in that environment by a community of folks.

The ViewCVS Group

The ViewCVS Group is an informal group of people working on and developing the ViewCVS package. The current set of members are listed below with some of their notable contributions:

Greg Stein
original python port of Henner Zeller's cvsweb, secure popen implementation, configuration file implementation, rcsparse module, and EZT template engine
Jay Painter
CVSdb query engine
Tanaka Akira
enscript colorization and tarball generation
Tim Cera
CvsGraph support, log_table template, regular expression search, and paging capability
Peter Funk
standalone server, blimp logo, and numerous improvements to ViewCVS's interfaces and documentation
Lucas Bruand
C++ RCS parser (tparse) and vclib module for supporting new version control systems
C. Michael Pilato
Subversion support, root_as_url alternative URL scheme, templatization work, website design
Russell Yanofsky
Windows support and the sapi module for supporting multiple web server interfaces
James Henstridge
integrated query interface, support for querying Subversion repositories, caching support, CSS formatting, and the EZT "define" directive

About This Site

The ViewCVS website was designed by C. Michael Pilato. All HTML was hand-edited in Emacs, and the little splashes of graphical goodness owe their existence to Adobe PhotoShop. Textual content for the site is mostly the work of Greg Stein, but has been tweaked through the ages by various ViewCVS contributors.