William Poetra Yoga H wrote:
> First of all, sorry to post something off-topic, but I couldn't find a way
> to contact the developers directly (without posting to devel).
>
> I used to dislike your project since I read that you want "To take over
> the CVS user base.", but I've changed my view today.
It seems to me that this was always more a technical goal than a political
one. Subversion's design accepts that whatever may be wrong with CVS's
implementation, the *user* model was not fundamentally wrong. Things like
renames, atomic commits, and cheap copies were not foreign to the mental
model of CVS, merely un-implementable in an efficient manner when the
backend was RCS ,v files.
The laundry list of practices used in CVS to work around those shortcomings
provided a pretty clear roadmap of what a sucessor ought to tackle:
* well known patterns to munge the repository for a server-side
move/rename: copy the ,v file, edit out any tags, update, cvs remove the
old name
* tools like cvs2cl.pl that tried to reassemble changesets by
fuzzy-matching comments, authors, and dates, to make an overall log
* add-on tools had the call the executable and parse human-formatted
results
* The use of tags as a sliding way of keeping track of integration points
(svn still doesn't really have great merge tracking, but the global
revisions make it simpler than CVS was, and tools like svnmerge and svk are
certainly experimenting with higher-level support)
Now, some argue with that basic premise that CVS wasn't hopeless (certainly
the fully changeset-oriented systems like arch or bk start with a total
rejection of the idea that a version control system is supposed to work by
taking snapshots of an evolving central tree). But those systems can't
displace CVS as easily as SVN can, because they require more adaptation
from developers - SVN stayed close to CVS + all the workarounds that were
common.
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Received on Sun Apr 10 09:42:43 2005