Feature request: directory attachments

[Steve Soule]

I would like a feature added to cvs that lets you specify that a module 
is attached as a subdirectory of a directory.  This feature would mostly 
make the modules file unnecessary.  Here's how I think it could work:

If a directory contains a file with the name ".cvsattachments", its 
contents should be parsed as a list of modules that should be checked 
out in that directory when the parent directory is checked out.  This is 
just what the ampersand module feature provides, except that cvs update 
would know about it too since the information would be in the directory 
instead of in the modules file where update can't make sense of it.

The ".cvsattachments" file could be versioned just like any other file, 
and if the user did "cvs update -d", and the new .cvsattachments file 
specified a subdirectory that wasn't there before, update could grab the 
appropriate module just like checkout does now with ampersand modules.

The format of the .cvsattachments file could be a sequence of lines, 
each of which is a subdirectory name followed by a module name.  The 
module name should be in absolute URL format so that it can be in a 
separate repository.  Is there a URL format for cvs module names?  If 
not, someone should create one.

This feature would work almost exactly the same as subversion's 
svn:externals directory property, only with the data stored in a file 
instead of metadata.

There are several reasons why I think a per-directory attachments file 
is better than the existing modules file functionality:

1.  Every cvs component would know about the structure, not just checkout.

2.  The module containment information is stored in the affected 
directories instead of in a repository-wide modules file.

3.  The module containment information is associated with the module 
instead of with the repository.