Re: checking in links to source control

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, September 10, 2001 at 13:33:57 (-0700), Edward Peschko wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: checking in links to source control
>
> I want developers to see - locally - all of the perl libraries cross project.
> When I do a release, I want people to do a simple 'cvs checkout' to get the 
> entire project, and have it *work on the spot*.

Nope.  BZZZZZT.  Wrong.  CVS is not a build system.  Get a new paradigm.

(You might be able to hack something together with a script run on
checkout, but the last time I tried that it was a major nightmare to get
right, and to maintain.)

> CVS should have link support.

Nope.  BZZZZZT.  Wrong again.

>  Saying that it shouldn't is tantamount 
> to saying that 'links are a bad idea' inside of archives.

There's an almost infinite supply of rationale for this decision in the
archives too, not the least of which is that RCS can't do it either, and
any scheme you might dream up should: a) work with bare RCS; and b) work
in such a way that a name in the filesystem can exist, at different
times, as a normal file, or a link, or a hard link.  I'll bet you'll
find meeting those requirements nearly impossible.

> Yet CVS purports 
> itself to be a generic mechanism for distributing projects like tar or 
> compress

Nope.  BZZZZZT.  Wrong yet again!   Where the heck did you get that
idea?  RTFM, for starters (specifically the nodes "What is CVS?" and
"What is CVS not?")

> - I see it used to distribute mozilla, for example - if it is to be 
> true to this calling, it should support links.

Nope.  BZZZZZT.  Wrong again!  CVS is used to manage the changes made to
Mozilla by a widely diverse group of poeple.  As such it's also used
even by third-party developers to access those changes on a timely basis.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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