[wellylug] CVS woe

[Daniel Pittman]

Jethro Carr <jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com> writes:
> On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 00:17 +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> First, you have a problem that needs revision control.
>> "Ah!", you think, "I will use CVS."  Now you have two problems...
>
> heh, indeed. :-)
>
>
>> > I think the -r option for rlog refers to the file revision, not a tag,
>> > if I'm reading the man pages correctly, but I can't find any method to
>> > specify fetching log by a tag.
>> 
>> Correct.  Presumably because that is insanely hard, is it would involve
>> trolling every file for the revision that tag is associated with, then
>> generate the log from that.
>
> Interesting that it lets you generate diffs between tags without too
> much hassle. I guess the developers never got around to adding support
> to the commit history as well.

Yeah, I didn't consider that: diff by tag requires the same trolling of
all files, so presumably they just never got around to implementing it
for the log operation.  *sigh*  I don't have /fond/ memories of CVS.

[...]

>> Um, converting CVS to SVN is really not terribly hard, and will
>> significantly improve your life.  Certainly it is a fairly trivial step
>> away from CVS, but a significantly less limited and painful one.
>
> I have moving to a new repo server on my TODO list, so it will be a
> good time to look at new options like SVN and Git.

Well, the main reason I suggest SVN is that conversion is trivial, with
a plethora of scripts available, and the basic requirements and
interface are fairly similar.

That makes it a fairly small step, usually, and gives you significant
advantages, without costing you too much hair.

(Well, installing the HTTP based server can be a bit hair-reducing, but
 you don't need that if you are happy with file or ssh+file access to
 the central repository.)

Usually the change is accompanied by a few hours of pain as you discover
what it does differently, but not much more.


Moving to something like git is going to be a huge culture-shock, so
while they are the new hotness you should expect literally weeks of
wrapping your head around all the ways it works differently.

This is because, git, while powerful and while improving /still/ has a
fairly user-hostile interface, and any DVCS is extremely complex
compared to CVS or SVN.

Regards,
        Daniel