RE: Future CVS Development

[Paul Sander]

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>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Kostur, Andre [mailto:address@hidden

>> Now, pluggable engines would be truly cool!  I know that one 
>> large argument
>> against CVS here (my office) was that it doesn't do 
>> "intelligent" things
>> with proprietary format non-mergable files (like MSWord 
>> documents), where
>> other source control systems can do (the counterexample was always
>> Clearcase).  But if you could plug in a diff/patch tool for 
>> *.doc files,
>> (and perhaps a different diff/patch tool for *.ppt, another 
>> for *.xls) that
>> would make these files mergable, and thus behave sensibly in CVS! :)
>> 
>Because of the above, you'd probably need one diff/patch tool for
>every file format, and you'd need to keep the diff/patch tools
>steadily updated for changes in file formats (MS Word file formats
>come to mind as changeable).  This is in contrast to the diff/patch
>standard in CVS, which applies to a large number of different sorts
>of files, and can remain unchanged.  I'm not sure producing diff/patch
>tools for arbitrary file formats is reasonable to expect out of an
>open source project.

Perhaps not, but it is reasonable for a shop to supply their own enhancements
and keep them up to date.  Simply providing hooks to plug in the diff/patch/
merge tools is sufficient in CVS; supplying the tools themselves (except for
a few defaults such as those already supplied for ASCII text) is not
necessary.

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