* Kate Ebneter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [000215 19:58] wrote:
>
>
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> >
>
> <Stuff from Karl Fogel snipped>
>
> > If this is how the rest of the CVS developers feel then...
> >
> > Action should be taken to ensure that Greg Woods doesn't continue
> > to mis-represent the project as a whole and developers should keep
> > a bit closer tabs on the lists to ensure that this sort of thing
> > doesn't happen in the future.
> >
> > If it's the opinion that the list has 'degraded' over the last
> > couple of months, then steps should be taken that _official and
> > active_ CVS developers attempt to occasionally stick thier heads
> > into the fray to correct people that are fostering false representation
> > of the CVS project's goals.
>
> I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous.
>
> Greg is proposing a patch that he is going to implement, to fix
> functionality he believes to be broken, in accordance with his
> understanding (which, btw, coincides pretty closely with mine) of CVS's
> strengths and the design goals it was created with. He wanted some
> comments on it; instead, he's been repeatedly attacked, in some cases by
> people who CLEARLY aren't reading his proposals, in other cases by
> people who understand what he's saying but don't like his ideas of what
> CVS should be.
>
> I don't understand the motives of those who attack Greg without really
> understanding what he's saying, and while I understand the motives of
> the second group, they're responsible, IMHO, for the
> deterioration/degradation/call it what you will of this list into a more
> or less constant flamefest.
>
> Personally, I instinctively distrust anyone who says "steps should be
> taken..." There ARE no "official" CVS developers. As Karl points out,
> there's a commonly accepted version of the source, at cyclic.com, that
> has been the de facto "CVS" for a while now, but NO ONE is stopping
> ANYONE from forking the source and making a better version of it.
And how do patches make it into the "de facto" CVS tarball? Is it some
magical process where they pile up on cyclic's doorstep until magically
they are put into the distribution?
Forking a _working_ version of CVS would just be too resource
intensive for most companies.
> > Basically, if this is the official CVS list, then a real developer
> > presense is nessesary, maybe not to answer questions, but to make
> > sure that people have the right kind of idea about your project.
>
> There's nothing "official" about CVS. It's open source, get it?
> Moreover, it's not like Perl, where Larry Wall has the final say about
> what happens to it; only the end users, ultimately, have the final say.
Apparantly you're completely confused about this issue, numerous patches
have been brought forward to address things that are broken in CVS
which don't seem to get a second look once Greg gets a chance to point
out that it fixes something he's opposed to actually working.
There's at least five people a week asking for locking.
This project is not driven by the community, it's quite obviously
driven by the ego^H^H^Hphilosophy of one man.
Fine! Bend to his will, but at least axe the broken code out of the
distribution!
Don't leave it there as a tempting thing to fix for some young
developer just to have Greg ram his philosophy down the poor kid's
throat when he finally musters the courage to submit patches.
> > If certain parts of the system are officially broken, and have been
> > broken for AT LEAST A YEAR then action needs to be taken to either
> > officially mark them as 'broken' or remove them entirely, so that
> > they don't sit there as potential traps for the unwary!
> >
> > Either
> > a) fix it.
> > b) mark it as broken.
> > b) chop it out.
> > c) allow patches to go in to address it.
> >
> > Stop letting this junk stagnate.
>
> > I appreciate your effort with trying to clear things up for me, it seems
> > there's a lot of work involved to get things back on track.
>
> *sigh* I'm not one of the current CVS maintainers, but I use it
> literally every day, and I can't see that there's anything _seriously_
> broken in the current CVS except a few problems I run into occasionally
> using client/server mode between my Unix server and the Windows clients
> we have. In fact, I'd personally like to THANK the folks who've taken
> CVS this far.
>
> Minor rant: I'm tired of hearing, on this list, about how CVS is broken
> because it doesn't support locks, or because it doesn't support symlinks
> properly, or... SYMLINKS??? Symlinks have no place in a serious build
> environment unless they're created on the fly -- they're not portable,
> for one thing, and, well, I could go on, but I won't. And as for
> locking, I'm sorry, but what part of CONCURRENT Versioning System don't
> people understand??? If y'all wanna turn it into Control Via
> Synchronization, well, could you please do it to another source code
> control system? Please? There are TONS of very good source code
> control/versioning systems using synchronization via locking. There are
> very few that permit or properly support CONCURRENT development, let
> alone make it the center of the development model. I _NEED_ CVS to be a
> CONCURRENT versioning system. I don't need locks, I don't need symlinks,
> and I certainly don't need 100+ emails a day telling me that Greg Woods
> is a jerk...
blah blah blah, look, you don't really get it do you?
If symlinks and locking is so terrible then for christ's sake
RIP IT OUT OF THE CODE!!!
I personally don't give a hoot what you use CVS for...
~~~ begin wavey lines ~~~
A bit over a year ago at a job I realized that because we didn't
use any sort of source code revisioning system it was killing us.
I proposed CVS and started playing with it, other developers got
a hold of me and wanted to know about things like locking and
symlinks.
I wandered through the docs and came across PreservePermissions,
unfortunatly turning on PreservePermissions turned on a whole lot
of other horribly broken and buggy features in CVS, such as actually
preserving the permissions and non-functional hardlink tracking.
I sent in some patches that allowed people to be selective about
exactly which features of PreservePermissions they wanted to
activate, this allowed me to just get my symlinks.
Greg enters at this point...
Greg squashes my innocent little patches like a fly...
Greg laughs and continues on his tirade about the evils of symlinks
and proposing that i use some combination of airplane glue, toothpics
and balsa wood to achive the same thing that my simple patches
would have done.
I fail my save vs spells and my patches are cast into the bottomless
chasm.
~~ end wavey lines ~~~
Now that's to the best of my recollection, it may not have been
exactly airplane glue he proposed, but I don't have my email archived
from that far back.
At this point I really don't care all that much, I unsubscribed
sometime after sending that intial email, CVS is going to continue
to be broken and I'm tired of watching this depressing show.
asta!
--
-Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
