June meeting

[Rob Funk]

Robert Jewell wrote:
> I enjoy hearing some info on alternatives to CVS (subversion, etc)..
> maybe just some quick pros&cons from anybody that's exhausted
> possibilities.. maybe somebody could explain to me what's wrong with
> CVS that the wheel gets reinvented.

Anyone who's used CVS for any length of time should be familiar with its 
disadvantages.
1. Renaming or moving files while preserving their revision history is 
cumbersome at best
2. Tracking simultaneous changes to multiple files requires careful 
attention to tagging.
3. Branching and merging are painful
4. Centralized repository is problematic for certain development methods

Subversion is intended to be a direct replacement for CVS, addressing its 
biggest shortcomings without changing the basic model.  It addresses the 
first two issues and I think the third to a lesser extent.  (I haven't 
used Subversion enough to see how well it does there.)

Oh yeah, I understand that CVS's own code is barely maintained anymore.

One disadvantage I've found to subversion in my short time working with it 
is that its database seems to get too easily corrupted.  It's easy to 
recover, but it's still an annoyance.  CVS's textual repository doesn't 
get corrupted.

There are others, such as arch and bitkeeper, that take a decentralized 
approach.  Each developer has their own copy of the full tree, and there 
is no server repository; the maintainer just keeps a master tree.  That 
means everyone has their own branch, and merges happen constantly.  Some 
people swear by this, others hate it, and still others don't see the big 
deal.  I think it all depends on the type of development your project 
requires.

I recently converted the fetchmail revision history over to Subversion.  
This was an interesting exercise because fetchmail was maintained with 
RCS.  So first I copied the RCS files into a CVS repository, modified them 
a bit to fit CVS rules on tagging, then I used a cvs2svn program to 
convert to Subversion.

-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"