outsider's perspective

[Phil R Lawrence]

Well, I want to say thank you to all who posted regarding my query regarding 
dir versioning.  That was a heck of a discussion.  My resulting perspective:  
CVS seems innapropriate for our real world needs, preferring instead to serve a 
"purer" versioning paradigm.  (A paradigm which, by the way, seems too complex 
for me to easily understand.)

To recap, I was looking for:
  - the complete history and versioning of every individual file
  - the ability to recreate dir structures, including hard and
    symbolic links

These 2 things would have allowed me to checkout our whole ERP dir structure as 
of a given date.  Sweet!  

Greg says to use the right tool for the right job.  Well, I wish CVS were the 
right tool, because the two "right tools" I've read about have real problems!

ClearCase:
ClearCase costs a lot of money.  I mean a *lot* of money.  Now, my organization 
might pay for it, or they might not, I don't know.  We are a University in the 
USA, so we do have money.  But I guarantee most of this world would never in a 
million years be able to pay that sort of money.  So while my org might get by, 
the rest of the world suffers for the lack of an open source solution.

My own custom build tool, wrapped around CVS:
Gimme a break.  It's taken our ERP vendor a decade (more?) to evolve their 
current ... um...  way of doing things.  I'm pretty good at hacking and 
munging, but I am not prepared to try and automate all of the linking and the 
recreation of the other inconsistent results of their upgrade scripts upon CVS 
checkout.  No, I need a tool that can simply capture the *results* of their way 
of doing things and leave it at that.

In conclusion, I know I have little choice but to follow Greg's advice.  I'll 
use CVS for my little perl modules, but I'll be sorry to report to my boss that 
CVS won't work for our ERP versioning project.

Phil