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Goals

• Do not assume any access to the repository other than via this protocol. It does not depend on NFS, rdist, etc.

• Providing a reliable transport is outside this protocol. It is expected that it runs over TCP, UUCP, etc.

• Security and authentication are handled outside this protocol (but see below about `cvs kserver').

• This might be a first step towards adding transactions to CVS (i.e. a set of operations is either executed atomically or none of them is executed), improving the locking, or other features. The current server implementation is a long way from being able to do any of these things. The protocol, however, is not known to contain any defects which would preclude them.

• The server never has to have any CVS locks in place while it is waiting for communication with the client. This makes things robust in the face of flaky networks.

• Data is transferred in large chunks, which is necessary for good performance. In fact, currently the client uploads all the data (without waiting for server responses), and then waits for one server response (which consists of a massive download of all the data). There may be cases in which it is better to have a richer interraction, but the need for the server to release all locks whenever it waits for the client makes it complicated.

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