RE: CVS vs. RCS

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, August 29, 2002 at 10:54:26 (-0400), Zieg, Mark wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: CVS vs. RCS
>
> To my way of thinking, CVS is network-centric while RCS is host-centric.
> RCS seems to require (correct me if I'm wrong) that all developers
> cooperating on a project actually log into the same host, or else you have
> to shuttle a lot of files around manually.

Well, sort of, though with a full working[*] NFSv3 (or v4) client and
server implementation, or AFS, it's trivial to use RCS over the network
via the distributed filesystem.  You'll need an IPsec or SSH or some
proprietary encrypted tunnel to do such things securely over WAN links.

There are other network aware front-ends to RCS too.

[*] I don't know of any freely available _and_ complete NFSv3 client
implementations yet, so choices are very much narrowed, though it may be
possible to make an RCS variant implementation that can safely interlock
with other instances over even NFSv2.

> This leaves RCS hopelessly crippled in the internet age, when developers
> rarely have the opportunity or desire to share common hardware, and are
> frequently separated by thousands of miles.

Moving files across the network is just one way to use a network, and
not always a very good way at that.  (well, at least in the normal
internetworked unix world there are other MUCH better ways to access
remote machines)

It's probably just as easy to simply ssh over to the central development
machine and hack away, no matter what the version control system is.
Heck I've even used emacs-x11 over 56kbps ISDN links lots of times!

(other version control tools approach the distributed operation issue
from yet another reasonably sane direction, such as the way BitKeeper
works, and presumably a bitkeeper-like tool could just as easily be
built upon RCS as it has been on SCCS, but then one has to ask the
question as to whether RCS or SCCS is the better underlying file
versioning tool, and I concur with Larry McVoy et al and say SCCS wins
hands down.  There's room for improvement across the board though!  :-)

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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