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.
> 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.
> 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...
Kate Ebneter
Build Engineer and Rabbit Wrangler
DataRover Mobile Systems
