[cvsnt] Re: cvsnt status

Glen Starrett grstarrett at cox.net
Tue Jul 15 20:12:51 BST 2003


> The only showstopper for me in the past had been lack of distributed
> (or at the very least, replicated) repositories, and even that was
> on one project.

My primary users of CVS are in Phoenix (me, where my server is), Houston,
Toronto, and Bangalore.  I would have liked to have a replicated repository
in Bangalore at least, but with compression and low overhead it's still
viable to use from there.  There aren't a lot of users on my CVS server, but
they are very widespread.

IMHO CVS's biggest shortcoming is the branching / merging support.  Maybe
it's just my lack of experience with it, but the required precision with
which you have to execute branching and merging seems excessive.  Branch
here, but make sure you tag it.  Now merge into trunk, but make sure you
either stop using that branch or tag again because now you can end up
merging the same changes twice if you aren't careful.  I likely just need
some practice with it to feel more comfortable, but IMHO it could be done a
lot better.

Combine that with having to rewrite every RCS file on a TAG operation and it
compounds the time to perform these type operations--and I can see the
advantage to moving to a database backend.  If that database backend also
tracked the branch merging and allowed for "easier" branch management, I
would certainly by happy.

> What will, eventually, be widespread (I think) is one of the newer
> version control systems - Monotone, darcs, Arch - which provide

I'll have to go look at those other project you mentioned, it sounds
interesting.

Glen Starrett



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