[olug] CVS Success Story

[Jay Hannah]

On May 4, 2004, at 3:46 PM, thehaas at binary.net wrote:
> I did a study at our office about moving from Visual SourceSafe to CVS.
> Despite the fact that our development environment (Eclipse) has better
> support for CVS than VSS, the Powers That Be decided not to move over
> (we all have Windows for our development workstations).  As we are
> moving forward to a few Macs and Linux machines needing to get to our
> source respository, that may change.

FWIW, all our MS Visual Basic (VB6, VB.NET) source code is in CVS. It  
sits in the same repository as all our Informix 4GL, Perl, and AIX /  
Linux / etc configuration files. There's several free drag and drop  
Windows clients for CVS. I can't remember which one we're using, and  
I'm in a plane headed to Dallas right now so I can't look it up. <time  
travel>(Now it's the next day and I'm on my way back to Omaha, still  
w/o Internet access. -grin-)</time travel>

> We use Bugzilla . . . its too bad your manager doesn't want it in
> high-and-holy Java -- it is one of the best moves we ever made.

We looked at Bugzilla. I was really hoping to find an issue tracking  
system that had email logging capacity: the ability to carry on an  
entire email thread and all of that will get attached to the ticket  
somehow (cc'ing the ticketing system, I assume?). Maybe that's not a  
realistic goal. We haven't found a system that does what I was  
picturing in my mind. Perhaps I just need to switch my expectations to  
a web-centered messaging system like Bugzilla...

On May 5, 2004, at 10:47 AM, gvanmill at unmc.edu wrote:
>  I was wondering about your view of Flat text files vs. Data bases for
> Version Control systems.  I think it was Brian last night sad that
> subversion uses the berkely database.  I'm concerned about databases  
> with
> future compatability etc.  I was thinking that a flat file can go a  
> long
> way.

You may want to check if there's a CVS-style export functionality  
already built into Subversion. It wouldn't surprise me. I would guess  
that RCS/CVS format (they're the same) will be a de-facto format for  
versioning for quite a while, since the "install base" of RCS and CVS  
is global and in heavy use.

Who can say what formats will be supported/common 10 years from now? I  
suspect few people will really care about what changes were made 10  
years ago anyway, so at some point over the extremely long run projects  
will all get transferred from one versioning system to another based on  
a current checkout, or a series of manual or semi-manual checkouts to  
fake-up 6 months of history or something.

Anyone know the history of revision control of the Linux kernel? That  
would be interesting to take a look at.

Perl (my favorite project I'm not smart enough to work on) itself is  
developed under Perforce. From the perl5-porters FAQ:

--------------
3.4) Is Perl in CVS?

Perl isn't available by anonymous CVS. Perl is, however, kept under
development control - it's using a Perforce server which is currently
hosted for us at ActiveState. Some pumpkings have write access to this
server. There is no public read access to this server - see 3.6 below.
---------------

You can see my latest patch to Perl documentation like so:

http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse? 
patch=18683&action=patch

And generally cruise Perforce via

http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse

Etc...

Toodles,

j

Omaha Perl Mongers: http://omaha.pm.org