RE: CVSNT discussion (was: To get some information regarding CVS)

[Arthur Barrett]

Spiro,


> Well, again, from my experience, most people who are using CVSNT are
> using it because they believe it would be the only way to use CVS on
> Windows machines, or because WinCVS (or TortoiseCVS) uses it
> "internally". Almost all of them would be perfectly o.k. with 
> "plain" CVS.

We obviously mix in different circles.  I know most of those I give help
to on the newsgroups want the extra features of CVSNT because they often
ask why some feature or another isn't working when using CVS server.

> If it is the fault of CVSNT or of the writers of the 3rd 
> party tools: I
> do not know. In fact, I do not care. I just want to be able to do it.
> That's my main reason I am not using CVSNT - and I am pretty sure you
> already know this.

Now that you remind me I do remember - but previously if asked I would
have put it down to 'mostly' that you do not want/need the additional
features.  In fact the migratability of CVSNT is far higher than many
tools including SVN and I imagine that if there was some CVSNT feature
you valued enough it would mitigate your concerns about migration.  

I know for a fact some people have migrated large CVSNT repositories to
ClearCase and other tools so this is not a significant issue from my POV
- though I strongly agree with Mark's comments that by submitting
patches to RCS for our modifications that we would improve the openness
of our changes and that is something I intend to do.  We already ship
our own custom versions of some RCS tools with CVSNT - in theory if you
use these with your migrate application it will 'just work'.

These issues of openness and migratability will eventually become an
issue for our new EVSCM product (which uses a database backend).  Our
current intention is to provide an RCS interface to this, but in light
of your comments (and others) I should revisit this and ensure that all
is as clear as possible.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett