[Savannah-hackers] Re: cvsweb vs viewcvs

[Joey Hess]

Mathieu Roy wrote:
>         The only feature that seems to miss in the cvsweb version I
>         tried is the tarball. Are there other important features
>         missing?

It's worth noting that I added tarball download support to cvsweb before
viewcvs came out. My patch has not been added upstream, AFAIK. It was
also mildly buggy (sometimes left droppings in /tmp).

> I've just took a look to /usr/share/doc/cvsweb/README.Debian (what
> should be done at first, obviously)
> 
>         We (Debian) see little reason to keep cvsweb in the
>         distribution in the long term, when a better, more or less
>         drop in replacement exists. That replacement is viewcvs, and I
>         encourage you to give it a try.   
> 
>         If you find a reason to continue to use cvsweb instead of
>         viewcvs (aside from inertia), I'd appreciate it if you'd drop
>         me a mail -- this will help me decide when I should get rid of
>         this package. 
>  
> Is cvsweb development stopped? According to
> http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/projects/cvsweb/ 
> there is still activity.

Right, that is one branch of cvsweb, the other one at
http://linux.fh-heilbronn.de/~zeller/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ has been less
active lately. Er, it is now gone completly, interesting.

I have not been keeping up with cvsweb stuff since I orphaned the
package last June (no Debian developer has seen fit to take the package
up either). At that time I had just learned of the freebsd tree, it
looks like it has now become the main tree.

> Also, the freshmeat account of viewcvs has been modified for the last
> time in January 2002 while the cvsweb account has been modified in
> September 2002.

The viewcvs CVS tree on sourceforge was last touched yesterday or so, so
I assume there is still development.

(BTW, I just noticed sourceforge's viewcvs installation has nasty OSDN 
text banner ads at the top. Thank you for working on a sourceforge
replacement.)

> Both of them are licensed under the original BSD licence
> (gpl-incompatible). 

The cvsweb package in debian (from the zeller tree) is licensed under
the modified BSD license without clause 3. I just looked at the freebsd
tree, and it is also licensed with the same modified BSD license:

# 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
#    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
# 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
#    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
#    documentation and/or other materials provided with the
#    distribution.

+ standard no warranty boilerplate.

I just looked at the viewcvs license and it is identical. So as far
as I can see, GPL compatability is an issue with neither.

> My problem is pretty simple: 
>         - On an old computer, which is far enough to be run nicely
>           iptables/bind9/dhcpd3/exim4+spamassassin/apache-ssl/mysql/...
>           .../nfs/cvs/ssh/...  viewcvs is really slow, while cvsweb is
>           acceptable.

I can agree with that. I don't know if python is slow, or if all the
modular OO stuff is slow, or if it is just something in the
implemnetatiuon, but viewcvs clearly needs more resouces than does
cvsweb.

> I wonder if cvsweb is as much outdated as it may seem. Joey, you
> surely knows much more about it, can you provide our opinion?

Well I'm nearly a year out of date on its development. When I was
working on it, I found it to be a festering morass of code, with too
many global variables, not enough abstractions, etc. Fixing security
holes in it was not at all fun. This is exactly the kind of program that
python advocates point at as unmaintainable perl code. I know what 
maintainable perl code looks like, and cvsweb wasn't it. (I have not,
however, looked at the code to viewcvs for comparison, and I don't speak
much python. Nor am I much for language advocacy.)

Back last June, viewcvs had more features than cvsweb, as listed on
viewcvs's web page, and it still looks to me like viewcvs is gaining
popularity, and cvsweb losing.

-- 
see shy jo

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