Re: CVSBookmarks and upstream submission

[Christian Reis]

(Apologizing for lack of context, mailer situation a bit complicated
ATM)

I do agree that the shell provides command substitution, and that it
does in a way emulate the functionality the patch provides. I just think
it's a nice feature to have in CVS, improving usability and offering
convenience at very little added complexity. Some rationale:

    a. The patch should work cross-platform, so it does not depend on
       what type of shell you are using. It should even work on the
       native command interpreters of the windows world.

    b. It avoids adding to the environment namespace a variable that
       doesn't indicate *anything* beyond a cvs repository. The
       environment is commonly used to set session-wide parameters,
       though we do have application-specific vars in spots.
       
       I personally dislike using environment variables for this sort of
       issue as the risk of the names clashing with something more
       `standard' [1] increases (think $GNOME, $MOZILLA, $ZOPE, for
       instance). 

    c. While I agree it's not a very strong point, having a separate
       bookmarks file does simplify maintenence from the user's
       standpoint (no worrying about what shell he might use, or if it's
       a login shell or not, or if he's clobbering a bashrc when moving
       it to another box). It offers a platform-neutral, shell-neutral
       way of specifying aliases for long pserver strings.

    d. While not a decisive point per se, having it included would suggest
       to people a documented, standard mechanism for accessing multiple
       repositories.

The patch is a client-side change only, and quite simple at that.  It
should be quite easy to audit it for problems and provide constructive
review.

So, the question is, are these arguments reasonable enough to warrant
further discussion of the feature, or is it a YAGNI? I know I've wanted
it a number of times, and so have other CVS users I've observed.

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/envvar.html

Take care,
--
Christian Reis, Senior Engineer, Async Open Source, Brazil.
http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 261 2331 | NMFL