The CVS Cop-Out

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday May 20, 2006 @05:30AM from the keep-the-users-happy dept.

NewsForge (also owned by VA) has a short piece attempting to call into focus one of the major complaints of end users, the "CVS cop-out". From the article: "One of my biggest pet peeves with open source software is what I call the CVS cop-out. It works like this: I criticize (accurately) some shortcoming of an open source application either in an article or in conversation, and someone responds with, 'That's not true! That feature was fixed in CVS four weeks ago!' [...] I bring up the CVS cop-out not because I have an answer for it, but to air it out. Sometimes, giving a problem a name helps to foster discussion that leads to resolution."

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Re:The diplomatic response by lukas84 · 2006-05-20 06:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

It depends on a lot of circumstances.

Fixed in CVS may also mean the following:

We fixed this problem in our unstable development tree, which you can't deploy at a customer, or anywhere else. Also, we won't backport this patch to the current stable release, because we don't have time for this. So we basically leave you with your problem, until our unstable development tree at some time maybe gets released.

And this problem isn't restricted to OpenSource at all.