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Re: cvs-1.11.2 test release



Nicholas Wourms wrote:

This sounds all good and fine, but I am faced with the following issues
(after a *brief* scan of the cvsnt webpage):

A)Most projects use CVS, why the hell would the development of the CVS be
dead?  Forgive me assumptions, but I thought the CVS project was one of
those key GNU projects?  Or is everyone migrating to subversion now?  It
seems like patches are being applied to the tree and some work is being
done.  Perhaps you should apply to become a member of the CVS project so
you can just import your patches on your own.  This apathy concerns me
greatly from both a linux and cygwin standpoint.  I usually welcome
change, but I think sticking with the tried and true CVS might be a good
idea.

The following is a quote from the HACKING file in cvs:

It is neither practical
nor desirable for all/most contributions to be distributed through the
"official" (whatever that means) mechanisms of CVS releases and CVS
developers.  Now, the "official" mechanisms do try to incorporate
those patches which seem most suitable for widespread usage, together
with test cases and documentation.  So if a patch becomes sufficiently
popular in the CVS community, it is likely that one of the CVS
developers will eventually try to do something with it.  But dealing
with the CVS developers may be the last step of the process rather
than the first.

And no, this ^^^^ is not boilerplate. They really mean it.


Also, there were about two years between 1.10.8 and 1.11.0. In the past 18 months, there have been two additional releases: 1.11.1 and 1.11.2. That's pretty slow development. From the attitude on the list, I'd guess that those releases were motivated by a desire to push changes the core developers themselves had produced -- not to incorporate patches "from the wider community". Apparently, FreeBSD had been trying to get them to merge changes for years and finally gave up


The fact is, "cvs" is a fairly stable package. There are few bugs, and they are unwilling to accept large patches (or even small ones) that MAY destabilize it merely to allow compilation/operation on "extra" platforms. They would prefer that "odd" platforms (like cygwin) continue as forks, to protect the integrity of their "core" code. Well, I'm tired of maintaining a fork.

The changes needed to run as a daemon on NT/cygwin -- and merely to *run* as a native NT port -- are far more intrusive than they want.



B)CVSnt on Windows seems to be nt/2000/xp-centric, what pitfalls can those
of us running ME/9x expect?  (This may be a question for those who have
tried the cvsnt on cygwin

Remember, cvsnt code is almost entirely cvs code. When compiled as a unix app, currently all the special nt-isms are #ifdef'ed out; you only get the bugfixes (that the cvs folks haven't merged). So, at first, there would be no difference on NT/2K/Xp and 9x/Me -- except those that we already know about such as FAT vs. NTFS.

Later, as we start "turning on" some of the cvsnt-specific code, additional differences MAY crop up in the daemon-mode code; you may not be able to run a :pserver: or :ntserver: daemon on 9x/Me -- but the cygwin kernel serves as a great "leveler", so we'll be able to (hopefully) minimize those differences.



C)Will it be MingW or native Cygwin based?  Although you did hint about
unix support, you didn't mention this explicitly...

cygwin.  NOT mingw.

D)Is there any functionality in the current Cygwin CVS that CVSnt wouldn't
be able to provide?  (I.E. SSH, etc.)

TBD. There are reports of difficulty using cvsnt + cygwin-ssh, but that's (a) a "mingw" cvsnt. (b) perhaps not representative of the universe of experience -- only those folks who can't get it to work bother to post...

Otherwise, the codebase is basically cvs, so I'd be surprised if there were big problems. There may be small wrinkles that we'd need to smooth out...



Forgive these flurry of questions, but I feel compelled to ask for myself
and undoubtly for others, as well.  I believe, no matter what, that you'll
arrive at the appropriate decision.

Understood -- this is a big change to a core tool; I don't want to do anything precipitous or without community support. Rest assured there will be a long 'testing' period before the (current) cvs-1.11.0-1 package is retired.

--Chuck

FYI -- out of email contact until Tues...



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