[ On Monday, February 14, 2000 at 10:32:58 (-0500), John Macdonald wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: removing the need for "cvs add file" to contact the server....
>
> RCS manges only files and not directories.
Indeed.
> CVS manages directory trees containing files. While the files are
> version controlled and not the names of the files or their
> positioning within the directories, the existance of the directories
> is not just ignored.
There's a very subtle but very critical difference between what you've
said and what CVS really does.
CVS manages groups of files contained within one or more sub-directories
by using RCS to record changes to those files. CVS is just a tool to
iterate many similar RCS operations over a group of files in such a way
as to facilitate the concurrent editing of changes to those files by
users sharing a copy of the RCS files in a central repository. It
doesn't do anything more than that, nor should it (and it does what it
does very well too!).
> Incomplete support is not the same as totally unsupported.
Directories are totally "unsupported" by CVS in the version-control
sense. There's nothing "incomplete" about what CVS does with
directories (unless you count the current hack of "cvs add").
> The repository uses directories to organize the version controlled
> files and that directory structure is mapped to and from the work
> area under the management of CVS operations.
Well, no, not exactly. CVS simply mirrors the directory structure it
finds in one place into the other, creating (and sometimes removing)
directories as needed. There's not really any "under the management of
CVS operations" in there. CVS "operations" only affect the files being
managed. The directories just exist to give structure to the modules.
CVS simply wanders around within a defined set of directories operating
on the files within.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
