Re: outsider's perspective

[Steve deRosier]

> No concurrent versioning system with a shared repository, and
> particularly not one that can operate in a client/server mode, can ever
> possibly make any use of ownership, nor even of most permissions bits.
> Ownership information, and most permissions bits, "MUST" always be
> specific to the client and it MUST NOT be dictated by the repository.

Yes, this makes perfect sense, and I agree with you.  Frankly I'm not 
even sure what it is that various people are asking with keeping the 
other meta info.  But it seems that there are other bits (not as in 1s 
and 0s) of meta information that people want to keep about directories. 
 Are symbolic links kept and versioned by CVS?

> If people would learn two things then all this stupidity would disappear
> in a puff of smke:  (1) CVS is a text file content change tracking tool, and
> _only_ a text file content version tracking tool; (2) all these things
> (file permissions, ownerships, symbolic and hard links, etc.) can far
> FAR more elegantly, simply, and clearly be managed by a build script,
> the source for which can be stored in CVS.

Again, I agree with your point of (1).  Also, I think that a build 
script is a good way to handle things (but I've always been a huge fan 
of the power of make and use it for many things beyond just building my 
latest C/C++ projects).  But, what about large directory structures of a 
web site?  The directory information is meaningful.  And the person 
doing the maintaince can't always login as the psudouser the web server 
runs as.  And a build script isn't necessarilly meaningful in this 
context either.

> > tar DOES NOT handle versioning or history 
> > information.  CVS does do this.  I was suggesting that somehow combining 
> > the two tools it may be possible to create a system that did what he was 
> > looking for.
>
>
> How do you expect to meaninfully combine a tool that creates binary
> files with CVS?!?!?!?

Frankly, I felt that was an exercise for the reader.  But one idea (not 
necessarily the best idea or even a good idea) was the user could tar up 
the directory structure and put the tar archive into CVS (using the 
approprate -k flag of course).  I would think you'd want to separtely ci 
your text files that were in those directories though so the changes 
could be tracked better.  Perhaps not good and maybe not any better than 
just keeping a directory with date-munged-file-named tar files.  As I 
said, example and not a good idea.  :)

Again, the point was missed.  It was an example that by combining tools 
(using make or other build facility), the user could come up with 
something that would do what it was they were trying to do.  And as I 
recall, isn't that the whole point you've been trying to get across -> 
use a build facility of some sort to do the parts that CVS doesn't do?


> > Also, if so many people NEED this functionality, why doesn't it get 
> > added to CVS?
>
>
> Have you not been paying any attention to the rationales I and others
> have given for why CVS is the way it is and why it doesn't do some
> things?

Of course I have been.  Considering that the same song and dance has 
been done here regularly to avoid making meaningful improvments in CVS, 
I could hardly miss it.  Many of the rationales are perfectly valid, but 
sometimes it sounds like you (and others) are rationalizing out a reason 
it can't be done simply because you don't want it to be done.  I'm often 
guilty of the same thing :) , but maybe we should try to be honest with 
ourselves and try to come up with a VISION of what CVS should be and 
where it should go in the future.  These problems and questions won't 
stop simply because we rationalize that CVS was designed to solve this 
set of problems but not that set.

I agree that CVS is for versioning text files.  But there are many text 
files formats (XML, HTML, RTF and so on.  All are text files.).  And 
some of these do depend on directory structure to be meaningful.  And 
some of these are occasionally not handled properly by CVS if the 
reports on this list are any indication.

CVS is great, and it handles text files fine.  But putting arbitrary 
roadblocks in front of your users defeats the whole purpose.

- Steve