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RE: Converting ClearCase to CVS


From: Greg A. Woods
Subject: RE: Converting ClearCase to CVS
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 19:42:05 -0500 (EST)

[ On Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 15:40:15 (-0800), Paul Sander wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: Converting ClearCase to CVS
>
> Well, the problems were largely due to user errors, corrupting their
> CVS meta-data.  I also spent some time fixing corrupted RCS files, and so
> on.

While there have been bugs causing such problems in the past, they've
steadily been eliminated in more recent releases.  Even so I can't even
begin to imagine having to spend several hours per day dealing with such
things, not even with hundreds of users -- my experience is very
definitely to the contrary, even going back to the very early days of
client/server CVS and before.

>  Plus, for users whose experience is limited to things like SCCS and
> RCS (which in that environment was most of them), just having a source
> code repository outside their home directory is a serious mind bender, and
> so after the second time someone performed a checkout inside the repository
> I hacked CVS to prevent such an occurance from happening again.  Cleaning
> abandoned locks was a big time-sink, too.

Hmmm.... perhaps you're talking about times long ago before it was
possible, but client/server CVS makes such stupid errors difficult if
you set it up properly.  Bend their minds and they will correct their
ways (or go away screaming, but either way the headache of supporting
them leaves your mind alone ;-)).  Assuming client/server support was
available at the time then allowing them to access the server in the
first place was your fatal mistake here....

> And that didn't include remapping source trees when we imported new releases
> of software that got reorganized between imports...

Your problem, not CVS'....

> There's no doubt that many freeware projects, some of them large, benefit
> greatly from the use of CVS.  I don't believe that they spend zero money
> on support.  Again, there are those pesky hidden costs, e.g. the owner
> of the server gets a report of orphaned locks in the repository and has
> to clean them out yet again.

<pedantic>
I don't know of many freeware projects that spend any money on support
of any kind, at all, and they definitely use CVS.  That means they spend
zero money on CVS support.
</pedantic>

Yes they get services and some support donated, and their developers may
spend hours on CVS support that are not spent directly contributing the
project instead, but you said "spend zero money on support", and that's
exactly what they do -- spend zero (0) dollars on CVS support!  ;-)

> Even on my personal system where my toy projects make very few demands on
> CVS (no branching other than vendor branches, no concurrent development,
> no binary files, no reorganizations, no use of *info files, small source
> files, few source files per directory, very simple modules, and a very stable
> server), I can't claim that CVS just runs by itself 100% of the time.

I've not poked directly into my personal multi-gigabyte CVS repository to
fix any problems in several _YEARS_, and I use it on a nearly daily
basis.  I even run beta versions of CVS.  Am I just lucky?  I don't know....

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <address@hidden>;  <address@hidden>;  <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>



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