Wednesday, November 24, 2004

IntelliJ IDEA, Windows, CVS, SSH and SourceForge

I'm having trouble with one of my open source projects, PCGen, getting the fabulous IntelliJ IDEA on Windows XP to integrate with CVS over SSH to SourceForge. When I imported the project into IDEA, it read the connection settings from the CVS/Root which were :ext:binkley@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pcgen. Ok, then. However, IDEA was then unable to make a correct SSH connection and IDEA would simply hang. I had to kill an errant ssh.exe process

I followed the directions on CVSWithSSH except that I really didn't want to add a depedency to PuTTY. PuTTy is great software, but I wanted Cygwin's ssh to do the job if possible.

Then I found SSH and CVS and got an idea. I checked the repository settings for my IDEA project and after some experimenting switched from :ext:binkley@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pcgen to :ssh:binkley@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pcgen. What's the difference?

Using the "ssh" protocol instead of "ext" (external based on the CVS_RSH environment variable), I told IDEA to use its own internall SSH implementation. Amazing! Now everything "just works".

UPDATE: My only complaint now is that IDEA keeps the CVS settings in my user preferences, instead of with the project. Perhaps in the next version. IDEA 5.0 is looking to have quite a nice feature set including serious CSS & HTML support, XML refactoring and the YourKit Java Profiler built right in.

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