Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel were both formerly heavily involved with the maintenance of CVS, and although only Karl is still active, Jim does show up occasoinally.
As to enhancing not rewriting: many of the problems people have with CVS grow directly from its origins as a set of wrappers around RCS. It is file oriented, not project oriented. This imposes certain limits on what it is practical (if not possible) to do within the framework of CVS.
As for your GIMP example---well, in fact, the GIMP guys did exactly the same thing. The original GIMP was in Motif, but they scrapped that and wrote gtk. This is, I think, entirely analogous to what subversion has done with respect to CVS.
Sometimes the only way to progress is to make a distinct break with the past.
Regardless of where your particular alliegances lie---whether it be with arch or subversion or opencms or bitkeeper or whatever---it does seem obvious that the open source community is asking things of CVS that it is just not able to deliver. One need only look at some of the problems large projects like GCC have with it to realize that some alternative is needed.
And if that doesn't convince you, well, it's not for nothing that some of the primary developers of CVS are now working on subversion.
Now, of the new crop of tools, the only one I've played with extensively is subversion---but I am absolutely blown away by how well it seems to make common operations simple. Even with its documentation in a very rough state, and despite its many architectural differences from CVS (with which I have several years of experience), I was able to figure out how to maintain a vendor branch and local modifications, perform updates on both, merge them, tag releases, etc., very quickly and easily. Its developers have obviously looked at CVS to see what things it does not do well that people do frequently, and designed accordingly.
Is subversion for you? Who knows. But if you use CVS a lot---especially if you find yourself cursing CVS a lot---you should do yourself a favor and look at some of the alternatives. A lot of lessons have been learned, and you should avail yourself of the benefits.
Apparently JWZ also invented a time machine...
on
Hacking The City
·
· Score: 1
Since he's listed as 29 on April 1, 1999, and 32 at the time of the article...
It used specially formatted messages dumped in your inbox (which SK would rifle through, not touching anything else) to exchange the information.
The thing that really impressed me was the fact that the messages were plain ASCII, and included instructions on how you could acknowledge the invitation by hand.
Mind you, I didn't use it myself---I had long ago gotten the NT box off my desk---but I was amazed at Starfish's intelligence.
Then SideKick '99 came out and they removed the feature.:-)
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Jim Blandy and Karl Fogel were both formerly heavily involved with the maintenance of CVS, and although only Karl is still active, Jim does show up occasoinally.
As to enhancing not rewriting: many of the problems people have with CVS grow directly from its origins as a set of wrappers around RCS. It is file oriented, not project oriented. This imposes certain limits on what it is practical (if not possible) to do within the framework of CVS.
As for your GIMP example---well, in fact, the GIMP guys did exactly the same thing. The original GIMP was in Motif, but they scrapped that and wrote gtk. This is, I think, entirely analogous to what subversion has done with respect to CVS.
Sometimes the only way to progress is to make a distinct break with the past.
Regardless of where your particular alliegances lie---whether it be with arch or subversion or opencms or bitkeeper or whatever---it does seem obvious that the open source community is asking things of CVS that it is just not able to deliver. One need only look at some of the problems large projects like GCC have with it to realize that some alternative is needed.
And if that doesn't convince you, well, it's not for nothing that some of the primary developers of CVS are now working on subversion.
Now, of the new crop of tools, the only one I've played with extensively is subversion---but I am absolutely blown away by how well it seems to make common operations simple. Even with its documentation in a very rough state, and despite its many architectural differences from CVS (with which I have several years of experience), I was able to figure out how to maintain a vendor branch and local modifications, perform updates on both, merge them, tag releases, etc., very quickly and easily. Its developers have obviously looked at CVS to see what things it does not do well that people do frequently, and designed accordingly.
Is subversion for you? Who knows. But if you use CVS a lot---especially if you find yourself cursing CVS a lot---you should do yourself a favor and look at some of the alternatives. A lot of lessons have been learned, and you should avail yourself of the benefits.
Since he's listed as 29 on April 1, 1999, and 32 at the time of the article...
Mike.
was in, of all things, SideKick 98.
:-)
It used specially formatted messages dumped in your inbox (which SK would rifle through, not touching anything else) to exchange the information.
The thing that really impressed me was the fact that the messages were plain ASCII, and included instructions on how you could acknowledge the invitation by hand.
Mind you, I didn't use it myself---I had long ago gotten the NT box off my desk---but I was amazed at Starfish's intelligence.
Then SideKick '99 came out and they removed the feature.
Mike.