[cvsnt] Cannot use WinMerge to vew revision diffs on ISOfiles...

Gerhard Fiedler lists at connectionbrazil.com
Thu Dec 6 16:38:43 GMT 2007


Arthur Barrett wrote:

>> Server side cvswrappers doesn't seem to be a good solution in any case. 
> 
> Quite the opposite.  Version Control is a part of CM, which is a process
> that organisations generally want to enforce with server based rules. 

I understand that, but it may or may not work, given the proliferation of
file types on the same extensions. I bet you didn't know that there were NC
files with text content with the extension .iso -- and I bet there are many
more that we don't know about but that are used by developers somewhere.

> If in some parts of the organisation .iso files are text and in others
> they are binary then just use two repositories, one with a cvswrappers
> of iso=ko and the other with iso=kb. 

If that could be easily separated by parts of organizations, that would be
nice. But nobody can guarantee that it's not the same part of the
organization that needs to store .iso CD images and .iso NC text files in
the (preferably same) repository.

In any case, it doesn't seem to work well with the currently existing GUI
frontends. Neither TCVS nor WinCvs add an .iso file as text file when
explicitly instructed to do so. This is IMO a pretty strong violation of
standard GUI behavior -- if the GUI tells me it is adding it as a text file
(or worse, if I tell the GUI to do so), it should do it. But this could
(should) of course be fixed in the GUI, by using explicit -k options when
adding text files instead of relying on an unknown default.

> On the 'compatibility' tab of the CVSNT server control panel there is
> even an option to completely ignore all client side k options - that is
> our recommended setting for use in a commercial software development
> environment.  

This doesn't fit any of the cases where the same extension can be text or
binary, depending on the file. I'd just hate my developers having to rename
all their .iso NC files to .iso.txt (or their .iso CD images to .iso.bin)
just to be able to work with the repository. In the end, such practices
usually tend to create less data consistency and not more (because it
creates a separation of the actual working file from the repo file). And
neither would I want to rely on developers editing the CVS/Entries file
after adding and before committing the add...

It also would force all the GUI frontends to violate pretty severely (IMO)
general, expected GUI behavior. Adding a file as text that I added (in the
GUI) explicitly as binary or vice versa is not good.

> If you really want to switch off the server side cvswrappers altogether
> then the existing syntax certainly allows that. 

(As long as the "ignore client-side -k options" is not enabled, I presume.)

As I said before, this (or something similar) is what I think the GUI tools
should do. I just don't think that adding a file as binary that I told the
GUI to add as text is a good solution.

Gerhard


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