Re: [Savannah-hackers] address@hidden: Re: Strangeness in quail-input-string-to-events]

[Loic Dachary]

Dave Love writes:
 > >>>>> Guillaume Morin writes:
 > 
 >  > You cannot update the CVS repository using pserver. 
 > 
 > Somewhere there was a promise that it wouldn't stop you changing the
 > way you work...  That probably stops me contributing.
 > 

        Guillaume probably doesn't have all the history of our
exchanges.  I tried to help you setup ssh some months ago, for the url
and w3 projects. It turned out not to work for you for some reason (I
could search the archives if this is important to you). I then
suggested you to talk to William Perry who originally explicitly asked
us to remove the compatibility with the subversions.gnu.org:/cvs &
pserver for the url and w3. I highlighted that we can restore this
quickly but I was not willing to switch back and forth because William
Perry asks to remove it and you ask to restore it. I hope you
understood this at the time and that you still do. Unless I missed
something our conversation ended at this point.

        Regarding the emacs repository, and because of the bad
experience with url and w3 we decided not to remove the
subversions.gnu.org:/cvs & pserver compatibility as long as at least
one person is using it. Not even when a project leader or someone else
from the project thinks that we should and asks us to. Hence you'll
be able to use pserver with emacs and subersions.gnu.org:/cvs as long
as you need to.

        I hope this clarifies things. I repeat it again : no CVS access
method will ever be removed if someone is still using it. 

        I kindly ask you to consider that maintaining this
compatibility is both a security hole and additional work for people
maintaining subversions. If you ever get a chance to learn more about
CVS over SSH, please notify us so that we can further reduce the list
of people depending on these historical things. I'm sure that you'll
learn how to use CVS over SSH at some point. If not for emacs/w3/url,
it may be for other projects you're contributing to since it's now a
widely established method to work with CVS trees.

        There also is another possibility: using :gserver: instead of
:pserver:. This implies that your CVS is compiled with kerberos 5 support
and gssapi support and that you have a gnu.org kerberos account. For most
people it's way more complex than using CVS over SSH but it may be the case
that you already have the necessary tools and accounts. 

        I apologize for the confusion that was generated with the
url/w3 project. I always feel uneasy when what we do is a burden to
people we are supposed to help. We don't want to be the typical
sysadmin type who creates more troubles than they are supposed to
solve. For that matter we're not sysadmin, we're volunteers ;-)

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
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