Monks, Peter wrote:
> G'day Peter,
>
>
>>I think that a fair summary of any CVS/SVN comparison is that (in
>>spite of its claims) SVN is NOT a replacement for CVS.
>
>
> "Fair" summary? I beg to differ! ;-)
>
> Perhaps you could be so kind as to explain some use cases that CVS
> supports that SVN does not? I for one would like to know what I've
> lost my migrating, and I'm sure the SVN development team would love
> to add to their list of future enhancements.
>
>
>>It is however a set of primitive operations on top of which a CVS
>>replacement could be built.
>
>
> Of course we'd have to turn off some of SVN's primitives (versioned
> file moves, versioned directory operations) since a true "CVS
> replacement" wouldn't be allowed to provide any of those operations.
> ;-)
No you wouldn't. It would be perfectly acceptable for a CVS replacement
to provide extensions to CVS's functionality. But a CVS replacement has
to include all of CVS's current features and SVN doesn't do this. It
has features which could be used to implement the missing CVS features.
The most useful CVS features that fall into this category are tags and
branches. If you don't think this matters compare the usefulness of the
CVS based team interface in Eclipse with the SVN based team interface
(subclipse) in Eclipse. The difference is most visible when you wish to
do something like compare a working copy with an arbitrary branch or
version. This is easy for the CVS based version but unavailable in the
SVN based one probably because it's got no easy way of finding the other
branch in the repository (it requires knowledge only available in the
person who planned the repository's head and that's difficult to extract
programmatically).
So while SVN may be useful and have the same general purpose as CVS, it
is NOT a replacement for CVS and shouldn't be advertised as such. It
does, however, have useful features that CVS lacks but on the other hand
it lacks some useful features that CVS has (i.e. a user friendly
tag/branch interface).
Peter
--
Dr Peter Williams, Chief Scientist peterw@aurema.com
Aurema Pty Limited Tel:+61 2 9698 2322
PO Box 305, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, Australia Fax:+61 2 9699 9174
79 Myrtle Street, Chippendale NSW 2008, Australia http://www.aurema.com
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Received on Sat Oct 23 01:18:32 2004