Re: How to get started

[Maarten de Boer]

Hello Rondal,

The situation sounds horrible. I cannot image how things have not gone
completely ugly... I understand your position, but CVS offers you
several important features you will not be using with the setup you
propose, and frankly, I really think that no one sane can dispute the
advantages of a correct setup development environment over the mess it
is now, or the slightly less mess it would be following your proposal.

The major problems I see with your half-way solution

- Several people can open the same file, makes changes and commit. The 
last commit will overwrite the previous commits silently. With proper
CVS, those changes would have been merged properly. Don't disregard
the C in CVS!

- cvs commit (you say update somewhere, but I believe you ment commit)
will not contain user information.

- It is an extremely bad idea to be working in the production environment,
and using CVS inside it will not make it any better.

I really think that setting up CVS in such a half-hearted way will be
dangerous. People will get a wrong idea of the use of CVS, and you will
have even a harder time changing that idea, than changing their work
habbits.

I think it would make a lot more sense to do a gradual migration to CVS
in a different way. Rather than doing CVS half-hearted on the whole
codebase, you could take a small portion of the codebase, preferably a
relatively young part, where all (or most) developers work on, and where
a lot of changes are being made. All developers work, as they should, in
their own workspace, and use CVS to commit their changes, update changes
for the others, etc. The production environment (of that part of the
code) should be a normal CVS checkout. Make sure people write correct
log messages, and that people don't go to long without commit their
changes. Forget about advanced CVS features, like branching. The need
will come up in time, but start with the basics.

I am pretty sure that after a month or so, all developers will be
wondering how the hell they managed without CVS, and love the new
approach. They will be begging you on their bare knees to move the rest
of the code to CVS as well.

A last thing, I think you should forget about keeping the history,
since, if I understand you correctly, their is no real structure or
logic in the files-based history you have now.

Maarten