Re: [Texmacs-dev] Arch mirror

[David Allouche]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:21:27AM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> > My problem with CVS is that I have to explicitly notify about
> > all changes I make to the directory structure. If I forget to
> > notify CVS about a new file, then it can be forgotten by CVS.
> > That already happened to me several times and it resulted in
> > the new files of simply being removed after a rm -rf, cvs co...
> 
> Simply renaming a file means
> 
> mv [oldname] [newname]
> cvs rm [oldname]
> cvs add [newname]
> 
> CVS is unaware of the relationship between the old and
> the new file. This is not so good.
> 
> But changes to directory structure are problematical.
> 
> Will there be a time when the directory structures are stable?

Hey! The topic of this thread is "Arch mirror", not "How to put up with
CVS brokeneness".

When a project has been using CVS for a long time, that there are
existing processes, tools, users which rely on it, it makes sense to
continue using it.  But the only reason I can see for a project which
does not use any version control system yet to choose CVS is ignorance.

CVS is badly designed (on top of RCS, no multifile commit, no support
for renaming, symlinks, file permissions), poorly implemented (it scales
badly for big projects) and generally a pain to use (poor branching, no
merging abilities, no concept of changeset).

If you really want to use CVS-like, use Subversion. But it is basically
as ugly as LaTeX: take something broken that everyone use and try to
make it look less broken.

If you want something really good, use BitKeeper which is great but is
absolutely non-free.

If you want something that nobody else uses, there are tons or marginally
used version control systems around. But why be satisfied with only
partial marginality? Let us use our own VCS that nobody else uses. That
is a perfect solution to lower the access barrier.

I believe common sense would suggest choosing something that is a
quantum leap from CVS, which is a GNU project and which has hundreds of
messages _a day_ on its users mailing list. And this is Arch.

But then... after all... I you really enjoy CVS, that is still better
than nothing.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa