At 11:06 AM 11/30/2001 -0600, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
>Mattias, this is probably unnecessary, since this 'browsing'
>functionality is really part of the reason we're using the WebDAV
>protocol.
I hope you will reconsider this. The only reason an 'ls' was not put into
CVS is because of the limitations the CVS development group put on commits.
There are several patches that implement this floating around because so
many people considered it useful. You could approximate the functionality
by using "cvs -n co ." but it was entirely hackish.
Because of this limitation, the cvs GUI clients were always inferior to
many other versioning systems. Some have clients that provide access to the
repository as a tree, with both directories and files expandable. The files
expand to show you the revisions of the file (in svn, it would be just the
revisions where a file changed, I guess). You can perform a checkout from
anywhere within the tree you are browsing, even on a particular revision if
you like.
Because of the lack of an 'ls' in cvs, its clients never implemented this.
Instead, they relied on developers just knowing the structure of the
repository. Because any reasonably complex project is not easily
memorizable, developers end up switching back and forth between their
browser (pointing to Greg's excellent ViewCVS) and their cvs client.
I'm not that particular about whether the command line client exposes 'ls'
functionality (although I don't see why not), but I think it would be
highly desirable to include this within the client library. If you don't,
then we end up with the same scenario of switching between multiple tools
just to perform a checkout.
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:51 2006