[cvsnt] Several questions on cvs usage

[Tony Hoyle]

Garyl Erickson wrote:
> Tony,
> 
> What do you mean by "hasn't worked properly for years"? I've been using 
> it for years, thinking it was working, as it appeared to be working. Are 
> you telling me it's been lying to me?

It did things like modify the sandbox (expecially if -d was in the 
.cvsrc.. it'd create empty directories) and using -j options was 
obviously a no hoper as to test a merge you have to modify the file.

> This brings up a bigger issue. I'm extremely disappointed to hear cvsnt 
> is not backwardly compatible with cvs. At the very least, it needs to 

It is - -n didn't work properly in the original cvs that I first worked 
with - 1.10.8 - and that was many many years ago.  At the time I didn't 
care that much as I was basically the only user of cvsnt.. it wasn't 
until much later it was taken out as it got more and more unmaintained 
over time.

I did have a go at making it work a while back (leading to the '-n co 
fix' that then broke eclipse as it was expecting the bugged version.. 
you can't win... we had to add an option to emulate the bugs again!).

Nobody really uses it - we got enough of -n co working so eclipse could 
do it's ls simulation, but in all the years I haven't heard of anyone 
actually using -n up in production, otherwise they'd have found exactly 
as you did.. it simply doesn't do anything useful, or at least reliably 
useful.  There are plenty of ways of finding out the information without 
resorting to hacks like that.  The easiest of course is just to look at 
your frontend - it will have the functionality built in.

If you want to have a go at putting the functionality back in then be my 
guest.. it's a fairly big project but I expect it's doable (probably the 
only way to do it reliably is to write parallel commands that work on 
temporary copies of the sandbox).

Tony