coaxing scientists to use cvs

[Hensley, Jeffrey L ERDC-ITL-MS Contractor]

Friends,

Perhaps you can give me a bit of advice... (or lacking that, maybe some humerous wisecracks :)

I've been working together with a group of about 6 engineers/scientists for over a year. These are all bright people, but software engineering is not one of their strong suits. I managed to convince them to start using CVS to try to help maintain the scientific package that they are developing. Now, I'm no cvs guru or expert, but I'm much more comfortable using something cvs than they are.

Today, one of them calls me and says that they would like to create a new repository and start fresh with "project2"... (I'm using "project" in place of the actual name of the code). After much work during the last couple of months, they want to have version 2.0 of their code.

I started out by explaining that there isn't any need to start over again in CVS. We can tag the versions, etc... But the hesitance here seems to be because of some really sloppy development techniques; namely, the developpers will have multiple version of "project" checked out, with many hacks and working subdirectories, etc. They would like to be able to check out "project1" and get the old version, and check out "project2" and get the newer, cleaner version.

Any suggestions thus far?

Part of the desire here, I think, is that when they check the code out, they want to see it in a directory "project2", so that they can quickly tell at a glance that this isn't some older copy that they have left lying around.

So, my real question is coming (thanks for bearing with me thus far). Is there any way that the working copy directory that is created would be "/project" or "/project2" depending on whether they are checking out the latest version, or using a tag and checking out the older version???

Any help for the clueless is greatly appreciated.

-- Jeff

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Jeff Hensley, Ph.D.                          Phone: 601-634-4596
EQM On-site lead, ERDC PET         Fax:   601-634-3808
3909 Halls Ferry Road                   address@hidden
Vicksburg, MS 39180-6199             http://www.erdc.hpc.mil
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