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Cyclic discontinues offering CVS support contracts
raggy wrote in to say that Cyclic is
discontinuing its' support for the CVS system. Existing contracts will, of course, be honored - however, with Jim Kingdon taking a job at Red Hat, CVS support is being passed to the community.
no thanks, I have some Doritos, and they taste better
I believe that "MS Visual C++" says enough about your comment.
It took your programmers 2 months to setup cvs!?! What, are they trained chimps like you?
I had cvs up and running within an hour, along with setting up ssh, and accessing the cvs repository remotely via ssh.
So either you are more full of sh*t than a backed up septic tank, or you are one of those paid Microsoft astroturfers.
Whatever. CVS is somethig from the age of the dino.
Hey Rob, why not add a feature to have the IP address of the posting host included along with each message next to the score and username? That way if a luser is posting many many flame/troll messages we can easily see them for who they are and ignore them.
You can't setup a simple text based tool? I could teach someone how to install & get running cvs in about 15 minutes, if they were a slow learner.
/.'ers.
Keep up the good work astroturfer, I'm sure you'll get a nice raise for trying to raise the hackles of
No, my code is stored in a professional graphical project management system. (Visual C/C++) This system does not require our developers to need any technical support, thereby saving our company time and money. Time also == money.
Someone left a computer in the monkey cage and the trained chimps can't figure it out.
I bet after your company switched to the Visual project management system your companies costs for technical support was much less right?
I know ours was.
No, I mean to stop lusers from posting 5 messages in a row that are flamebait but you're not sure if they're from different people are not. Generally they won't go login again every time. :-)
That way you could look at them and go "geez.. punk luser with nothing to do but flame... ignore that IP for awhile."
And just were are these GUIs that uses CVS?
does MS Source Safe work with ANYTHING except MS (n/n)?
it also works with emacs. infact it works with alot of things.
the problem as the person said was that cvs is a pain to get setup and configured the way you want and it is even more of a pain to teach people how to use it and it is even more of a pain than that to get it to work well with your favourite ide. since they were using source safe it is probably a good bet that they were using devstudio too, does cvs work as well with devstudio as source safe does? no it dosent...
get off your damn high-horse and come back to reality for a while.
Where is this GUI for working with CVS? Let me guess, it's that MoooooTifff looking stuff right?
No Qt?
No MFC?
hmmm maybe the GUI looks like it was written using the Athena API...
Thank you. Finally a decent GUI CVS program. I wonder if there is a UNIX/Linux version that looks like this one.... www.wincvs.org
That's one ungly GUI if I ever saw one.
www.wincvs.org looks so much better. Has more features too.
I usually post with an account, but IP numbers -- 'specially on a site like this -- would be a disaster. I have no desire to have thousands of bored kids trying to break into my system simultaneously..
[ NOTE: this is not meant in any way to imply that the majority of people reading this site are bored kids, or that the majority of kids are bored, or that the majority of bored kids are also immature jerks, but just scan the comments and you'll see that there's a significant enough minority to be worrying... ]
Daniel
If your developers need technical support to learn a new program (I estimate that CVS takes about 5 hours, *tops*) you need new developers..
Daniel
what I think his is alluding to is the ability to do local repository updates and then periodically resynchronize with other repositories. In short, with CVS everyone has to share the same repository. ( one can argue about the exclusive locking vs. merging approach to source control. this just moves the merging approach to the respository level. As opposed to the project/file level in CVS).
Adittionally, if I remember correctly, Linus didn't poo-poo CVS specifically. It was a general stab at all the present systems in the context of large number of geographically disperse developers working most asynchronously. Bitkeeper being the upcoming promising contender that would work "better".
Bitkeeper seems to resemble prcs, which I like better anyway. [ yes. prcs has internet isssues.]
Uh, why would someone using sourcesafe not be able to post questions on usenet?
We have considered CVS as a replacement to our current versioning system. Here's the crucial question, though:
You see, I want to be able to do a check-in whenever I have completed a partial feature so I can backtrack more easily when I mess things up. However, I don't want to confuse the other developers with my not-yet-release-quality changes.
This is something Bitkeeper and Sun CodeManager (by the same author) can do. A versioning system that doesn't support this feature is unusable to us.
I suppose that even if CVS didn't support this requirement, it could be made to support it relatively easily. You'd just have to have a mechanism by which the non-owners of the file would keep getting old versions of the file until the owner truly commits to the changes.
Marko
It's too bad Cyclic is no longer supporting CVS. It really is a wonderful source control tool. Just about my only gripe is that it doesn't do binary deltas (at least not that I'm aware of). Are there any plans for cvs to support binary deltas? (Maybe allow xdelta to be used as the cvs back-end instead of rcs.)
Pharmacy is great. Remembers all those random modules and everything, lets you scope the actual cvs commands. Can set up for multiple cvs servers, pservers, kservers, anon, etc. Quite simply, this is the shit, man. A very nice system, clean GUI integrated to the command line.
http://pharmacy.learnrespect.org/
I've used both Visual SS on NT, mac and unix and CVS on unix and can honestly say life is too fucking short to spend it cleaning up after VSS. (Checkins are routinely 4x faster over TCP/IP with CVS.) Give me sources in CVS or get someone else to do it.
Because CVS sucks. It costed our company way to much money just in the cost of the time it took to setup and get working right. We have about 2,000 developers and they just could not work with CVS. So we kep going with MS V C++ project mangement system. That worked fine.
>When I said "you can't run CVS disconnected" I mean really disconnected.
>As in on a laptop on a plane.
Yes, you can.
>Before you say "yes you can" please consider that your definition of "can" is limited.
>Yes, you can edit and modify files. Can you check them in? Nope.
Yes.
>Can you browse old history? Nope.
Yes.
>Can you reconstruct an old version of the repository and work on that? Nope.
Yes. You're entirely wrong about every point you make here. What you do is mirror the CVS repository itself and use something like CVSup (www.polstra.com) to synchronize them.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
So much for this then, eh?
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
First the ontopic:
"...there's a difference between thinking up and executing good code and choosing the tools with which to do that."
True, but there's also a different between what information people use to make decisions and what information they SHOULD use. When Joe Programmer hears "Linus doesn't like CVS." or even "Linux abandoned CVS for something more ABC" he is going to chuck CVS.
Now the offtopic:
"Elf Sternberg"? Not THE Elf? I think I've read a few of your stories...
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Check page http://marc.merlins.org/linux/balug9906/
where Linus is paraphrased as saying:
About source management, Linus is convinced that CVS is indeed not the right tool, and he is going to give a serious look at Bitkeeper when it comes out (scheduled for July 15th). (Bitkeeper is from Larry McVoy, and you can see my report of his talk at linuxexpo if you'd like more info about it)
--
A bad review from Linus could be the kiss of death for a dev tool...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
>It's all about open vs. close - does MS Source Safe work with ANYTHING except MS (n/n)?
Yes, Metrowerks Codewarrior at the very least. We use it as the source control system for a Mac/Windows project with a high degree of common source.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
See
http://www.red-bean.com/ccp.html
for details; this is a "CVS community" project,
designed to ensure the stability of the
CVS maintenance process and of the resources
currently found at www.cyclic.com.
-Karl
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
This comment doesn't make any sense at all...
> Pinning support for hundreds(thousands?) of
> users on one person in a company is just bad
> policy.
> Is there nobody at the company with the
> required expertise?
As stated in the atricle, there is only one full time employee.
To answer your question, they now have no support available.
This is not some big conspiracy or anything. The guy decided to move on. This is a pitful of free software. On the other hand there's the fact that this software is not just going to disappear. The comunity will now have the job of maintaining it, and anyone who wants to can provide support.
The company I work for uses ClearCase and ClearGuide for code management and they are decent, but we have had all sorts of problems with mangaled code on checkins. The only advantages I see with it is the multi-version filesystem, which on a large project like this (several hundred developers and about 12 months) does save considerable cost in space, since only changed files must be saved on all systems, and the user interface (personally I like CVS's interface better. The GUI for this system is exteremely slow and the commandline options are more complex than CVS's, but I know many people perfer graphical systems.) The argument for training is rather mute because in any reasonably complex system you are going to have to spend time in training and I don't think the time it takes to train someone to use CVS is that much longer than the time it takes to train them to use a GUI based system. We had all sorts of problems with ClearGuide when it was installed, and I can't imagine taking more than 10 minutes to set up a CVS system so I don't think installation is very simple. I was really hoping that with Cyclic advertising and stuff CVS might get some corporate backing and make a take some marketshare, but I'm afraid that corporate use just isn't going to happen with out support and advertising.
Are they going to need a full time employee to support gcc, are are Red Hat going to do any development on the compiler as well?
As I recall, the CVS documentation says that if this is ever a problem then there is a problem in your process. People should know what others are working on. The doc go into more detail. that.
Speaking for myself, I've worked with RCS which has pessimistic file locking like you mentioned. I found it more of a hassle finding a file was locked and having to bug people to check in their code, or breaking the lock because that person was on vacation and forgot to check everything in.
On the contrary, a good habit to be in is to make small changes to the source and check it in. That way you discover conflicts quickly. It also requires you have good modularity in your projects, so changes are usually limited to one file and not scattered everywhere. For those cases which do require many large changes, they are big enough that you would have to tell everyone to stop working anyway (ie, under VSS you have to tell everyone to check their code back in.)
Also, I have some concerns about how the automatic three-way merging will work with binary form files (can't do a diff/merge then) which our Oracle work uses.
Take a look at the documentation section on binary files. There's an option, `-kb', to specify that a given file is a binary file, and there are options in cvswrappers(?) to specify how to to the merging. I believe you can specify your own way to do that.
I agree.. It's undermining the CVS user base by suddenly saying that they will, in the future, not have a paid way to provide support for the product. I'm honestly suprised that seeing as how much Red Hat uses the entire CVS system, that they don't take up where he's leaving off. Since he's there anyway, they may as well make money off it..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
There is no MS Visual C++ managment system. There is Source Safe. And if you are relying on SourceSafe, you have one MAJOR DISADVANTAGE. You are RELYING on having some sort of drive mapping to the data files. Visual SourceSafe cannot, to my knowledge, work with a client that simply passes data thru a socket. Remote users now need the overhead of full fledged NetBUI over IP to use it..
Don't even get me started on what happens when the drive goes down in the middle of a large update..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
And I'd be interested to know what company you work for that has 2,000 developers, and someone as incompetent as yourself having ANY sort of position of authority?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I believe that's "Last Train to Clarksville."
:^)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Perhaps you should reread the announcement. First, he's honouring all current contracts. He's not breaking any agreements.
C'mon guys, help me out here.
Regarding no file locking: You can in fact do locking with CVS, but it's just not the default. When I started using CVS (on a small 2-person Linux project) I initially used locking, but it proved so annoying that we've turned it back off, and haven't had a problem with bad merges. Consider also that largish teams like GNOME and EGCS use CVS all the time. If it sucked for team development, don't you think they would be using something else?
Regarding CVS vs. RCS: forget RCS. CVS is essentially a superset of RCS, so there's nothing you'll gain by choosing RCS over CVS, and plenty you'll lose.
Since I began using CVS on that project I mentioned above, I've since begun using it for my Windows code -- it works great, and it's not at all demanding. Basically, when I finish a significant update to one of my programs or libraries, I just type "cvs commit" at the command line and write up a short description of my changes. For that minimal investment, I get automatic source duplication (i.e. disaster protection), a running change log (both in terms of code and functional description), and the ability to roll back changes.
Anyone who programs without something like CVS needs to be quickly and firmly reeducated. Similarly, anyone who pays big bucks for such a tool without first looking at CVS is doing themselves a big disservice.
VC/C++ doesn't have any source control system. Your comparison is inept. Visual Source Safe is the proper comparison. See my other comments on this thread for why not to use VSS.
It's indicative of your quality as a programmer that you don't know what your tools do.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Um... MS VC++ doesn't come with project management. DevStudio uses Visual Source Safe.
VSS works by mapping the filesystem of the server and acting directly on the files. That way, a poorly implemented or malicious client could totally destroy the repository. It also makes it very difficult to use through firewalls and whatnot. The protocol used is NetBEUI, which is archaic.
CVS uses TCP/IP sockets. It works through firewalls nicely. It has a couple GUIs that are at least as nice as VSS, so you aren't stuck in a CLI interface.
I am currently using both systems. VSS at work and CVS at home. I found CVS easy to setup, easy to use, stable, robust and effective. VSS is easy to use and stable enough, but it's setup is difficult and the protocol issue is enough to drive our administrators to drink.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
What about a non-reversible hash of the IP, though?
---
DNA just wants to be free...
tkCVS does a good job for me.
http://www.cyclic.com/tkcvs/
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Jim's best year was about 3/100th of 1% of the annual SCM market according to IDC.
Those people who are unhappy about him bowing out of the game would
have been better served by purchasing support from him.
People can't be expected to work for free.
Jim's best year was not enough to support one engineer at SGI or SUN.
1. Everyone knows RMS, the FSG, GNU, and especially the GPL are communist. Red, geddit?
2. It's from all the flames!
--
Infuriate left and right
I think it's rather irresponsible for any vendor to simply drop support - even if it is CVS we're dealing with. Pinning support for hundreds(thousands?) of users on one person in a company is just bad policy.
Is there nobody at the company with the required expertise? If not, why did they start supporting CVS in the first place? I think it's a convenient excuse to get rid of the higher support costs involved in CVS. Not that this is entirely a bad thing. But if I was a customer of theirs, I might be asking a few questions along the lines of "what support do you have that *doesn't* depend on just a few critical personnel? How can you guarantee continuing support with the non-cvs versions?"
--
Since every developer needs write permission on the repository's network share, you don't even need the malicious client - just have an idiot on your team!
One project I worked on lost two days of work because someone got the bright idea that it would be neat to see what was inside the repo. Fire up Explorer, a few mouse clicks and...hmmm...anyone seen the backup tape?
I just find it sad that MS still insists on selling braindead file-based apps when it's so fricking obvious that IP-based client/server works better.
Gosh, is there real widespread hatred of CVS, or are these all from the same Anonymous Coward?
Anyways, the reason you see help questions on Usenet is because people will answer them. For free! That's what Usenet is all about. If you had trouble with SourceSafe, you'd call MicroSoft.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This would have the side effect of filtering out posts from good posters who happen to use the same ISP and are handed the same IP number for their session
OTOH, a couple of past cases make me think it might be worth it.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
There is one called pharmacy which runs with GNOME. I have not used it personally, since I have found that the command line cvs program is more than sufficient.
Exclusive checkouts is a bug, not a feature. Once you've tried working without them, you'll never go back.
However, if you really want exclusive checkouts, you can use cvs watch and cvs edit.
CVS doesn't merge binary files. If you mark a file as binary, CVS will reject a conflict, rather than attempting to merge it. You must then resolve the conflict manually.
CVS and RCS aren't really comparable, although CVS is built on top of RCS. RCS provides revision control on a single file. CVS provides concurrent development on an entire repository.
And what do you store your code in?
Lemme guess - bitmap?
http://pharmacy.learnrespect.org/
The search effects the results.
You probably don't give a FRA, but there are several GUI CVS clients, including WinCVS which is written in C++/MFC (www.wincvs.org).
We're a small software shop doing 99% Windows based work and most of the developers would probably prefer to use Visual SourceSafe instead of CVS, however I've recently decided that we will be switching to a linux-based solution, only partially because of the high costs involved in maintaining our VSS licenses.
Some of my team are looking for problems w/CVS because they're scared of what they don't know. For example, one of them latched onto the fact that CVS doesn't have exclusive checkouts like VSS and he claims it will make it impossible to work as a team if we can't know exactly who has a file checked out at any given time. Also, I have some concerns about how the automatic three-way merging will work with binary form files (can't do a diff/merge then) which our Oracle work uses. I can't do anything about the tools we use, because it is dictated by the client we are doing the work for.
Any solutions out there other than CVS? How does RCS compare for a small team of developers (4)? The only requirement that I have is that a version control system run on linux and run over TCP/IP. Thanks for any help.
So is DOS, yet Microsoft still depends on it.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Was there a lack of functionality in CVS that existed in MS C++, or just the lack of a pretty GUI interface?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
The reason for this is that there are only 2^32 IP addresses with IPv4, and you don't have to search a good percentage of those (0.0.0.0/8 isn't allocated, 127.0.0.0/8 is reserved, 224.0.0.0/3 is reserved for experimental stuff including multicast...)
Your opinion might be a little more credible if you could ascribe software to its correct manufacturer (Borland and VC++?) or spell simple words.
:-)
1. CVS (and RCS) archive text or binary. Try man cvs.
2. Some of us, myself included, believe that text based code is superior. Easier to maintain (NB spelling). Easier to debug.
3. Professionals devote time to learning their tools. Training wheels are for children.
Happy computing
---- "When I grow up, I'll know far less"
CVS and VSS do nothing but keep track of files. Nothing more than a database and source directories. Any OS w a directory structure can do what you do. It only takes a few scripts.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Nice idea, really. I'm just paranoid regarding recent events.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Hmmm... I've had this idea occur to me a few times over the last couple of years, but I just put together some notes last night and earlier today. Maybe some of us should get together, spec it out and code it:
/gregor/project_ideas/cvfs.html
http://www.focusresearch.com
--------------------
perl -e 'srand(-2091643526); print chr rand 90 for (0..4)'
We have been using WinCVS to connect to a Linux CVS server for about 2 months. Zero Problems. I've never used Visual Source Safe so I can't say which is better but CVS is very nice.
BTW, another project at our comp. disliked VSS so much that they also switched to CVS.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I don't think that the person who doesn't know that the proper name for "MS VC++ project management system" is "MS Visual Source Safe" is qualified enough to make claims about the quality of CVS.
Do you notice your heart? Not until it starts hurting. That's the way the CVS is being used - seamlessly. Securely. Reliably. Configurably. Anywhere with C compiler. Without hype. Without wasting time clicking buttons and wondering "why the hell !!!!"
It's all about open vs. close - does MS Source Safe work with ANYTHING except MS (n/n)?
OK, kids, now get away from appliances, we're gonna reboot the house