JJ> This worked. It also gave me a few other files deep in the hierarchy, JJ> such as comm/gnus/gnus/.new.configure. Any idea why it didn't let me JJ> have them when I did the initial checkout? No, but I suspect many of our CVS problems will be fixed when we move to a server running cvs-1.10.recent. I intend to work on this in the next few months (as usual, though, no promises). I updated http://cvs.xemacs.org/ so that it says: Another neat something to put in there could be diff -u which will make sure everything always comes out in unified diffs, and checkout -P update -Pd which will make update get rid of empty directories and create any new ones in the tree. There have also been reports that some files are not created unless -Pd is used with cvs update.