About Chora

What is Chora?

Chora is the Horde Project's CVS repository viewer. It is used to provide web-based access to a CVS repository. Currently, these features include:

  • Directory-based views, with a summary of the most recent activity.
  • View full log history on a single file, with the ability to stick to a single branch.
  • Request arbritrary differences between versions and branches. These can be viewed in a variety of formats, ranging from raw diff output to human-readable HTML.
  • Visual branch viewing for a single file, which graphically represents the history of the file with respect to branches from the main trunk of development
  • Annotation (otherwise known as 'blame') support, which shows which authors are responsible for which portions of a file's contents.

There are many more features planned as the development continues, including a database/caching backend to speed up large repositories, searching capabilities, and integration with the other Horde projects and libraries.

Who wrote it?

Inspiration for this script is heavily based on the original CVSWeb script from FreeBSD. Charles Hagenbuch did the initial straight port from Perl to PHP, and got it working amazingly well. Anil Madhavapeddy looked at it, couldn't figure out what was going on, and decided to rewrite it completely from scratch, and implemented the current version with the CVSLib library, templates, annotation, the new interface, and so on.

Why call it Chora?

No, it's not named after an IKEA catalogue :-) Chuck and Anil are great fans of that prolific, and never-ending author known as Robert Jordan, and his Wheel of Time novels. Chora is the 'tree of life' from that series, and the connection between 'CVS' and 'trees' seemed obvious (to Chuck anyway).