Is there a way to find out if hosted code on sourceforge is svn or cvs and script the download process?

Question

For instance, is there a way for me to use svn or cvs (and how to find out which?) for a project if I have their project page -- for example, http://sourceforge.net/projects/ecb/?

Answer 1

Looking on the Source page for that project, it gives the CVS command

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@ecb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ecb login

Other projects that use CVS should follow the same naming convention. SVN looks to be similar:

svn co https://<project>.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/<project>

Answer 2

Something tells me you want to 'screen-scrape' to figure out which revision control a project uses. The project page has the link to the main 'Code' page which you can grep out by looking for the word scm. For e.g: The command (in unix, say):

curl -s http://sourceforge.net/projects/<project-short-name>/ | \
grep 'scm/?type' | sed 's/\(.*type=\)\([a-z]\+\)\(&amp.*\)$/\2/g' 

Should get you the words svn or cvs or both (or even other words ?) from the html links. This is just to illustrate how you can figure out the SCM a project uses programatically. You might have to write more or less code depending on where you want to 'script' this i.e. Questions like, is it on unix or windows ? is it for an eclipse plugin ? and many more come to mind.

Disclaimer: Many websites consider screen scraping a violation of the Terms of Service. Please check the sf.net policy to see if its ok to scrape the web-page before you do.