How does CVS concurrently manage binary edits?

[Patrick Salsbury]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 12:04:07AM -0500, Larry Jones wrote:
> David Wen writes:
> > 
> > How could I make only one person could edit a file and lock others out?
> > Currently it can let more than 2 developers to edit the same file at the
> > same time.  How to overcome this problem?
> 
> It's not a problem -- it's the key thing that differentiates CVS from
> other version control systems.  It's the *concurrent* versions system,
> not the one-developer-at-a-time versions system.
> 
> -Larry Jones
> 
        I'm currently implementing a Repository which contains documents
and code among a team of developers, project managers, etc., and have run
into a snag where I'm not sure CVS is capable of doing what I want.
        For the most part, I want CVS to merely act as a data repository
for our work, and some of the users are Windows users, and are storing
Microsoft's crappy binary formats (*.doc, *.ppt, *.mpp, etc.) within the
repository. I've set up cvswrappers to work around those files and store
them without munging, but the question has come up several times: What
happens if two people edit the same binary file concurrently? 
        To my knowledge CVS won't be able to do a think about it, but
perhaps even more importantly, will it flag the overlap? Will it let a user
know that they have just tried to commit a binary file that was editied,
*and not lose data in either file*? 

        Microsoft has some sort of version/history thing at least within
Word. Theoretically, the users can try a manual merge if they have both
binaries. My question is just whether CVS would notify them, or silently
crunch the data? (I suspect not, since it's so rigorous with text-based
files.)

        And yes, I know that binary-format files are a stupid way to do
things. But I have to do this in stages, and just getting people to use
version-control is a nice step. Maybe we can move them into non-MS tools
later on. 



        Still also haven't found an answer to the WinCVS/SSH bug I posted
about last week. Where can I go to talk to the WinCVS developer community?
http://www.wincvs.org/ doesn't seem to be on the net anymore, and the stuff
on http://www.cvshome.org/ appears to focus on the server-side software. I
can't find links for the WinCVS stuff, other than just to download a
binary. 

-- 
Pat
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