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CVS Helper Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the contrib-spice-adds-more-flavor dept.

MetalShard asks: "While building Pocket War we started using CVS and found it to be the best version control system any of us have ever used. We are also using Code Historian which works with CVS and lets you analyze the changes you have made in you code, and TortoiseCVS which adds an easy to use front end to CVS. It seems like there are a lot of cool add-ons for CVS, but we have not found a good CVS server configuration program. Is there one?"

5 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The best? by n1ywb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Binary delta storage?? So what? Yeah rename would be nice. Changesets. But I would hardly call those "vital features". Hell RCS is sufficient for most small projects with only one developer. Bitkeeper really shines in the area of massivly multi-developer projects. CVS is fine for any small to medium sized projects. It's also free (as in beer). I've never heard of ClearCase.

    --
    -73, de n1ywb
    www.n1ywb.com
  2. The best, yikes! by Tom7 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... we started using CVS and found it to be the best version control system any of us have ever used.

    Wow. Really? I use CVS, as do most of my colleagues, but I don't know anybody who actually likes it. It's filled with idiosyncracies, is fundamentally insecure, is totally useless for binary data, and lacks basic obvious features. You want to delete a directory? You want to get a list of the actual changes when you update? You want to nest CVS repositories? Sorry, not in CVS!

    1. Re:The best, yikes! by Slashed+Otter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Amen!

      CVS is a necessary evil whose only real advantages are price and public availability. Unfortunately, it's kinda become a standard so you can put up an anonymous CVS server and not have to tell anyone how it works. It's also integrated into so many other products (IDEs, ANT, etc) that you almost forget how much of a kludge it is.

      So many things in CVS are complete hacks that everyone has gotten used to. Tagging is used to emulate many features of real SCCSs, but ends up being just a big hack that never seems to work right. Plus, you can't do really simple things like checkout a tree that isn't tagged a certain way. Renaming files, atomic check-ins, new directories not showing up when you update...the list of features missing from CVS is very long.

  3. Re:The best? by aminorex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ClearCase is appalling bloatware. You're lucky.

    Everybody does rename by delete+create, or by
    moving the repository file. No reason not
    to automate it, methinks.

    Binary deltas would really be good.
    The easiest would be encoding as ascii hex
    at the client during commit when the entry is
    marked -kb. That would take perhaps 20 minutes
    to implement. Of course the storage would be 3x,
    but you'd get that back after 2 deltas.

    Changesets would also be easy to add.
    Thing is, you can add the feature, but can
    you get it back into the distribution?

    --
    -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
  4. Integrity checking by Phronesis · · Score: 2, Insightful
    How about error recovery and integrity checking? There are no checksums or any kind in CVS repositories, so you can never find out whether a repository file has been corrupted until you try to check out an old revision or perform a branch merge and find out that there's a broken delta in the way.

    To me, the lack of good integrity checking and error recovery is the greatest weakness of CVS. It means that you can't rely on recent backups, but must keep every CD you've ever burned of your repository.