[cvsnt] FW: RCS format question

[Arthur Barrett]

> indeed ViewVC can work with CVSNT without any problems. I only
> don't see what this viewVC has to do with the question from the OP

If ViewVC can work with CVSNT then so can bonsai, and whatever steps
were taken to make ViewVC work with CVSNT are probably the same ones
needed to make bonsai work with CVSNT.

However the 'problem' is more fundamental than that: CVS needs a complex
thing like Bonsai to track who changed what most recently - in CVSNT
that information is in Audit - any Excel speadsheet can query it (via
ODBC) and it should only take a perl or python progammer about 15
minutes to come up with a web page that can query the CommitLog table
based on the standard Bonsai questions.

If you look at Fabio's recent history of posts to the mailing list you
will find that smartcvs get's a lot of mention, just like in the most
recent post.  

I appear to have inflamed the situation by suggesting in several open
posts on the newsgroup that if CVSNT is being used for a commercial
purpose or for a wage earning activity that the orginisation/person
should financially contribute to the development of CVSNT - especially
if they have already shown they have money to spend on 'client' tools
since keeping the server patched, fully open source and feature rich is
somewhat business critical if it is storing your entire revision
history.  

The reply argument (as I understand it) is that with a limited budget
that some people may find that spending money on a 'rich GUI' is more
urgent (to keep users 'happy) especially since CVSNT Server works so
well and is open source (whereas the 'ideal' GUI appears to not be
available without spending cash).  To assist people with such limited
budges March Hare Software give a rich client GUI away when you
'purchase' CVS Suite and that money goes directly to supporting the
CVSNT programming effort - so you get the best of both worlds.

And the arguments go on and on, which if you are really interested in
you can read in the mailing list history.  The bottom line is that
according to the Free Software Foundation (GNU) the 'free' in 'free
software' is about the 'freedoms' the license gives you, not about the
price - in fact CVSNT costs $ 9,900,277 according to ohloh.net and users
of 'free software' should expect to stump up hard cash for business
critical software if they expect it to remain 'free' and supported and
feature rich.  The aim of us programmers who develop and maintain CVSNT
is for 2% of people who download CVSNT to purchase a single copy of CVS
Suite - which should be an easily achievable goal and if we achieve it
we can triple our paid staff.

Finally - if anyone has been using CVSNT server and comitted revisions
then switching 'back' to CVS will possibly irreperably corrupt the
repository the first time CVS writes to an RCS file (CVS makes no claims
to be backwards compatible with CVSNT).

Regards,


Arthur