RE: CVS vs Visual SourceSafe

[Rod Macpherson]

Probably 99% of the "how do I lock" questions are CVS noobs
uncomfortable with the general answer: you don't. 

Bottom line: locking introduces development bottlenecks with almost no
benefit. In fact it's a false sense of coordination where changes are
blown away on a regular basis: bugs magically reappear. 

The exceptions are binary files. Can't merge so concurrent edits are
wasted effort. CVS allows files to be locked in that case but a better
solution is using edit/unedit. You can list editors. 

The best solution, IMO, would be to have an exclusive editor (xedit)
where commits could only be executed by that user until xunedit was
called. That could be overridden with commit -F so it would not be a
true lock. The exclusive editor would be part of the status so an IDE
could show files as being held by an exclusive editor -- I hesitate to
say "lock" because it's more of a courtesy thing than a hard lock. 




-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf
Of Bittner,Peter
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 2:19 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: RE: CVS vs Visual SourceSafe

Edwin,

> While there is much to say for the concurrent versioning philosophy,
> there are also many situations where it is not the optimal solution.
> (As represented by the fact that every so often this list receives
> question about how to exclusively lock a file using CVS).

Of course, you are right. (Really, I meant: Do I need concurrent access
to sources or is it okay to only have exclusive access by locking?)

Subversion, in the current version, does provide exclusive locking. And,
doesn't CVSNT also do it?

It might be worth and interesting to check out some comparisons. The
following ones are those I found on the web: (Anyone knowing others?)

General:
- http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison/comparison.html
- http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php

CVSNT vs. CVS:
- http://www.cvsnt.com/cvspro/compare.htm

Cheers, Peter


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