cvs and cvsup problems?

[Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

maybe i'm stupid, but i'm seeing really odd things with both tools (getting
development trees):

cvs: it gets a complete linux tree, but there is no top-level makefile.  it
isn't clear to me what to do, at that point.

cvsup: it gets a complete tree, but there are all kinds of revision files (the
',v' suffixes), and attempts to build get weird errors from make.

i don't remember seeing either of these behaviors before.