Re: Unix philosophy under the gun?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, August 3, 2001 at 14:51:24 (-0400), David Fuller wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Unix philosophy under the gun?
>
> The glue in question involves reporting, logging, replication/mirroring,
> and integration with other products (such as bug/feature tracking).

Did you do a cost-benefit analysis of those features too?

Did you also do a true and in-depth total cost of ownership analysis for
the the alternative solutions over the lifetime of the projects
involved?  There are a lot of hidden costs that many people miss and
others prefer to ignore....

I'll bet you could drop down any of them to a level of functionality
that would exatly meet your needs but where the costs of implementing
the necessary CVS glue would be lower than any thing else every time.
I.e. I'll bet even though you're getting more up-front features for less
money in some off-the-shelf thing, they're not all features you need and
in the end you're actually paying more money for those things you don't
need.

(Of course the same could be said of Aegis or other freeware tools, or
even of some commercial tools that would need similar integration, such
as BitKeeper.)

>  And
> why shouldn't CVS be able to integrate with 'a decent build system'?  I
> wouldn't expect CVS to be a build system, but to work with one would be
> nice.  And yes, I'm sure it can, but it would take time to get that
> integration in there.

Indeed CVS can be "integrated" with the build system!  I have it built
into Automake and Autoconf.....  I just update the release identifier in
my "configure.in" file (and commit it of course) and then type "make
release".  A fully tested source archive with all necessary intermediate
products included comes out the other end and my repository has a new
tag now marking the event.  It's not magic.  It's not even more than a
few dozen lines of write-once shell script in a portable Makefile
produced automatically for every one of my projects by my customised
version of automake!

That's release management and builds (source tars _are_ my product) all
rolled into one!

> Here's a question.  What is there to prevent CVS from becoming modular
> to the same degree as Apache?  Certainly time is a factor.  I'd love to
> work on that one if only I had more time (24 hours is never enough).

That's putting the cart so far in front of the horse that the horse
can't even see it!  ;-)

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <address@hidden>     <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>;   Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>