CVS question: when doing a checkout for the purpose of building a project on a testing platform, is it preferred to do a checkout, and ignore the CVS files that come along, or an explicit export to get only the source?

I think for testing purposed (we'll run this a lot more than deployment) checkout will work – I'd rather not have to be limited to a particular tag or date, I only want the most recent. But I'm open to solutions to this problem.