Re: Use of CVS on large scales

[Bob Bowen]

John Minnihan wrote:
> Do you have specific experience with CVS 'breaking down and becoming 
> unusable'?
> If so, please share that experience here so others may learn from it.

I think there are two obvious areas where CVS doesn't scale well:

1) Working with branches - the interface is just too primitive and
clumsy for large numbers of users to do the right thing. It's not too
bad if you have just a few branches and a couple of people that know how
to use them, but even then it's tedious. 

I would say the biggest deficiency is having to keep track of what's
already been merged, but it's also a pain to figure out what has changed
on a branch and making sure you've merged what's necessary without
always having the entire repository checked out (time consuming in
itself for large projects).

2) Building a unified development process on top of CVS; e.g. enforcing
conventions and policies which are inevitable as the size of the project
grows. The hooks again are too primitive and each script shouldn't have
to be called for every directory involved. The interfaces to the hooks
are all different and not enough information is available, e.g. what
branch is this on? I'm continually frustrated by the holes in the
support for the checkin templates in the client/server methods as well
as the lack of interactivity with the callout scripts.


My sense is that CVS is adequate for small, fairly independent projects
(even large numbers of small, independent projects ala sourceforge), but
it's certainly not industrial strength. Unfortunately, nothing else is
either, so most commercial efforts end up growing their own.


=Bob=

Bob Bowen  address@hidden  Process Engineering 
(952)876-4635