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The ImageMagick stable and development source releases are available via anonymous CVS. This is a convenient way for developers to download the ImageMagick source, fix bugs, or add new features. The source tree for ImageMagick is stored on cvs.imagemagick.org.

If you are new to CVS, we recommend you place these customizations in a CVS initialization file located at ~/.cvsrc:

  cvs -z3
  diff -up
  rdiff -up
  update -Pd
  checkout -P
  co -P
  get -P

A brief introduction to our recommended CVS customizations follows:

cvs -z3
tell CVS to compress the communication between you and the server. The compression level is 1 to 9 with 9 being the highest.


update -Pd
tell CVS to remove directories that have been removed on the repository and recursively update all of your subdirectories.


diff -pu
add the name of the changed method to the generated diff. It helps mostly when reading diffs and produces amy patches in unified diff format, which is widely considered the most readable and robust patch format. The options -p and u are non-standard extensions of the GNU diff command that are not supported by all versions of diff, especially on systems other than GNU/Linux (Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, etc.) If your system does not understand -u, you should use diff -c instead.


rdiff -pu
prepare a collection of diffs as a patch file between two releases in the repository. Rdiff flags are the same as the diff flags.

To access the ImageMagick source development tree, you must first set up your CVSROOT environment variable so that CVS knows where to go to grab the source from. The proper value for CVSROOT is:

  :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/ImageMagick

For example, in tcsh type:

  setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/ImageMagick

For a bourne shell (e.g. bash), use:

  export CVSROOT=':pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/ImageMagick'

Alternatively, you can specify the cvs root directly on the command line:

  cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.imagemagick.org:/ImageMagick

Next, the first time the source tree is checked out, a login is needed:

  cvs login

The password is anonymous. Enter it and press a carriage return.

To get the tree and place it in a sub-directory of your current working directory, issue this command:

  cvs co -P ImageMagick

To update the sources within a previously checked out directory, execute:

  cvs update

and only the files which have changed will be updated.

The available modules relating to ImageMagick are:

ImageMagick
core sources.


ImageMagick-NT
everything needed for Windows.


ImageMagick-World
everything related to ImageMagick.

For example, to check out the ImageMagick source for NT try this commmand line:

  cvs co ImageMagick-NT

If you require a specific release of ImageMagick, you can check it out with:

  cvs co -r ImageMagick-6.2.1 ImageMagick

where the ImageMagick-6.2.1 is the release branch tag. You can use:

  cvs status -v README.txt

from within an existing checked out directory to see what branch tags are available. Or type:

  cvs update -r ImageMagick-6_0_3

from within an existing checked out directory to move it up (or down) to that release branch.

Once a release has been tagged, checking out from a release branch is the only reliable way to obtain release files from CVS since the default is to always check out the current development sources, which may not be stable or released.