Re: How well does CVS handle other types of data?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, July 11, 2001 at 08:52:37 (-0500), Daniel Beckham wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: How well does CVS handle other types of data?
>
> Greg, as someone else pointed out.  It's a rare project that does not have a
> few binary files peppered in the source for various reasons.  Although, in
> your mind it would make the most sense to maintain those in a seperate
> facility, in my opinion, it's stupid and inefficient.

The more rare the binary files, the more sense it makes to keep them
separately.

The more common the binary files, the more sens it makes to use
something other than CVS (if not for them then for everything!)

>  Just because you
> don't need to merge those binary files doesn't mean you don't want to keep
> track of their history, etc.   As others have pointed out, cvs handles them
> just fine if you use the -kb option.

It's irrelivent whether or not you "need" to merge binary files.  You
may *have* to!!!!  If you use branches, and if changes to binary files
are made on branches then you _MUST_ "merge" them!!!  CVS simply cannot
do that and the only way to resolve the conflict is to choose one
revision.  If you're lucky there'll only be one or two such conflicts
during a branch merge and manual cleanup is easy.  However if you've got
dozens of GIFs, for example, and you end up with a conflict on each,
then you're in for a much more difficult cleanup.

> And in rebuttle to your comment.. there is no right tool for the job.

What are you talking about?  Of course there's a "right" tool, even if
its some lame script you write that used gtar over SSH and carefully
named files and directories!

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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