Re: outsider's perspective

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Tuesday, May 27, 2003 at 14:07:18 (-0700), Steve deRosier wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: outsider's perspective
>
> But, I would disagree that "CVS already does effectively what tar 
> does..."  No, tar creates a single binary file for archive purposes. 
> CVS does not do this.  Also, tar DOES handle directory information and 
> can preserve owners, permissions and all other directory meta-info.  CVS 
> does not do this.

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.

CVS does already partly handles the one permission bit that's meaninful
to copy from the repository, for what it's worth (almost nothing in
practice).

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.

>  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?!?!?!?

> 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?

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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