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.

Comments

Cyclic may become non-profit; project under way...

[kfogel]

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

This is too bad...

[Christopher Craig]

I really don't think that that much support is required for CVS as it is a really straight forward system, but corporations have a hard enough time going with it now; I don't see anyone using it without corporate 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.

Re:CVS sucks anyway.

[drig]

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.

More seriously now..

[Signal 11]

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?"



--

Problem: dynamic IPs

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

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.

Re:Let's Flame RedHat!

[DonkPunch]

And some of us untalented ones are doing ok, too. :)