Re: Subversion versus CVS

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Fischer, Oliver wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> a small question: Are they any plan to extend CVS in such a way, 
> that it offers similar features as subversion [1]?

Meta-CVS is a relatively tiny piece of software built on the CVS
platform. See signature.

You could say that it offers similar features to Subversion, but that
would be inaccurate. The big difference is that Meta-CVS works. I'm
confident that it can be deployed for production use.  The latest
release is 0.99; I'll be releasing 1.0 in a couple of days.

There are features broken in Subversion that worked right even
in very early releases of Meta-CVS.  For example, renaming of files is
done right. In Subversion, there is issue 898:

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=898

Incidentally, there is no bug database for Meta-CVS, because I haven't
received a single bug report yet. Which is good, because I have no
place to host it anyway.

One fellow had a serious installation problem, so I remotely logged in
to his machine to sort that out; it was just from using a bleeding edge
GCC version to compile the CLISP runtime. I found a more stable GCC on
his machine, pointed the configuration to that, and all built well.

Meta-CVS can store symbolic links. Back in August, I read that it was a
planned feature for Subversion, so I refactored it into Meta-CVS in one
weekend. I think it's still a planned feature for Subversion.

I don't think Subversion has a third-party importing feature that can
figure out renames and moves between snapshots. Meta-CVS does; and
it handles symlink reconfigurations as well.

Meta-CVS handles repeated merges from the same source. Like symlinks,
this feature is supposedly planned for post 1.0 Subversion.
 
-- 
Meta-CVS: directory structure versioning; versioned symbolic links;
versioned execute permission; versioned property lists; easy branching
and merging and third party code tracking; all implemented over the
standard CVS command line client -- http://freshmeat.net/projects/mcvs