Re: outsider's perspective

[Steve deRosier]

Wait a sec...I was was not trying to suggest a solution (though I've got 
an idea, more in a sec), and if anything just a very specific solution 
to help with a very specific problem that one person was having.

I'm not that familiar with Meta-CVS, having never used it.  Though 
perhaps I should take a look soon.  The most basic CVS functionality has 
always been sufficient for my projects and frankly has more 
functionality than most people at my current company are willing to try 
(why I can't convince some people around here that CVS will always 
properly merge stuff OR complain I don't know; we've got people here 
that when they need to merge: grab a print out of the local file, 
overwrite their local with a fresh checkout, hand edit and then check 
in; they don't trust it to merge automatically even if it can and will; 
will the insanity never stop?).

A suggestion:
If Meta-CVS is essentially CVS II (or CVS III as someone pointed out as 
I was writing this), then why not try to merge the two projects (or 
parts) together.  Make what is currently CVS into the "CVS engine" and 
make MetaCVS the "new" commandline portion of CVS.  Bundle them together 
and call it CVS 2.0.  Old clients can still connect to the CVS engine 
via pserver, ssh or whatever and it can handle old calls, while newer 
commands are handled by the CVS 2.0 client.  Perhaps this requires some 
change in thought and maybe some people will need to upgrade, but as the 
usual response to peoples problems is "upgrade to the current version" I 
don't see how this is an issue.

> Okay, so if this is not legitimate, let's hear a concrete plan about
> how CVS can be extended to make a ``CVS II'' which is completely
> backward compatible with CVS I clients, and works as well as Meta-CVS.
> Better yet, let's see some code. It's not enough to propose alternative
> ideas when the existing idea is already coded. The CVS mailing list has
> seen more than a *decade* of idle discussions about this subject already.
As Don already pointed out, this is very unfair.  I don't have any 
interest working with a project that is held tightly by a very small 
group of CVS gurus that feel that their way is the only way to do it. 
As I pointed out already, I was just trying to help an individual with a 
specific problem, not suggest that what CVS did or does is right or 
wrong (and as stated, I don't have an opinion about it, it works for me 
as is).  But somehow despite the small and narrow scope of my help, I 
get pulled into this morass.  You all should examine your intentions 
here; do you actually _want_ people to help?  If so, you might want to 
make this place more open to new or other ideas.  Why would I spend time 
trying to learn the CVS codebase and then make changes if I feel that 
whatever I do is simply going to be summarily rejected anyway?  I've 
submitted patches on other open source projects (incl. Binutils and GCC) 
and frankly I'd rather spend my precious time helping out projects that 
want the help.

- Steve