Good questions!
You can just go to the 'admin' tab and type 'diff'. The admin tab lets you execute just about any cvs command with arguments.... stat, rtag etc etc.....
Doing a diff on a zexp file isn't going to be very helpful, though. Any thoughts on integrating some sort of xml diff tool?
Conflicts.. uh... bad news. ;-) I think it's essentially impossible to 'merge' two different versions of a zope object... so my plan would be to pick one version, or the other.
Login and logout are handled when you set up the directory on the filesystem. Basically you need to 'checkout' a module (maybe an empty module) into a directory on the filesystem before you can use it to keep the xml representations of your Zope objects. That checkout, might, or might not, require a login, depending on your CVSROOT. You must 'be' the zope user (the same user that the zope process runs as) when you checkout the module, so that zope can manage the contents.
So essentially all checkins are by the same cvs user, so you lose the ability to track accountability? I'd like to see something that was on a per-user basis, maybe tied to the zope user, maybe not. There's been a ton of talk about a zope cvs product. I've been thinking about giving it a shot for a while now. I'm excited to see someone actually doing something about it. I'd be glad to help out however I can. Especially since now you've taken the killer name. ;) --jfarr