Re: cvs add <directory>

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, May 22, 2003 at 16:42:47 (-0700), Kaz Kylheku wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: cvs add <directory>
>
> In Meta-CVS, I took the approach that directories are simply just an
> implementation choice in a filesystem to support hierarchically
> organized path names.

Why bother?  What a total waste of time and energy, and complete
perversion of one of the primary design goals of CVS.

CVS already ensures that a directory will exist in the workspace
whenever it needs to (provided of course that your users are smart
enough to always use the right options in their ~/.cvsrc -- i.e. the
options that should have been the defaults in CVS, or at least CVS-II,
from day one).

Files are created by creating them in the workspace and then creating
(adding) them in the repository (with appropriate initial revisions
should they only be created on a branch other than the vendor branch),
and once they are created in the repository they "exist" forever since
CVS keeps all recorded history for the lifetime of the repository.

Files are removed by checking in a "dead" revision so that CVS will
ignore them from now on unless asked explicitly to do otherwise.

All that remains of interest are changes to the content of the non-dead
files, and those changes are recorded into the repository on demand by
users running "cvs commit" as desired.

Files are just containers for content -- the real meat of interest.

Directories are just containers for files.

CVS keeps things simple by automatically managing directories, and even
files to some extent, allowing the user to focus on their content.  This
fulfils a primary design goal of CVS:  to keep out of the way as much as
possible.

If people want to use a database to store their content then they should
bloody well use a database and not CVS.  Use the right tool for the job!

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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