[slime-devel] CVS and friends

[Helmut Eller]

* dherring at tentpost.com [2010-08-23 15:54] writes:

> FWIW, Subversion was written because CVS has several well-known flaws
> which can result in a borked commit leaving the repository in a completely
> inconsistent state.  SVN was designed to be a drop-in replacement with
> atomic commits to fix the fundamental issues in CVS.

VCS debates...  everybody has heard all the arguments already a dozen
times and the result will be the same.  Let's face it: it's a waste of
time.

> Speaking from experience, newer tools including DVCSs *can* interact with
> CVS; but their users must give up most of the new features in doing so
> (including all the distributed features), and the conversion process is
> quite fragile and painful (largely due to CVS's lack of atomic commits). 
> It is not a pleasant experience.

I don't understand what you mean.  The point of those DVCSs seems to be
that you don't need a central server and that every clone/repository has
all the history and therefore supports *all* features.

> A switch to SVN means basically changing "cvs command" to "svn command". 
> The newer tools with vastly superior history models do have different
> command sets.
>
> IMNSHO, there were no justifiable reasons for using CVS in 2005, much less
> in 2010.  The choice of VCS has ramifications to end-users and potential
> developers.

Well, Emacs switched from CVS to Bzr a while back.  For someone like me
who essentially only needs "cvs up" once in a while the switch was a net
loss.  What used to take 2 minutes and downloaded 5 MB with CVS takes
now 20 minutes and 200 MB.  My urge to update is no pretty much zero.

I doubt that it was an improvement for real Emacs developers either, as
the main topic on the emacs-devel mailing list is now (since 6 month or
so) in how many ways Bzr sucks.  Good use of resources that is.

Helmut