I'm not sure I understand your statements. In our mode of operation, the CVS
Repository is backed up daily. You could also put it on and expensive network
disk/fiber/RAID/whatever if you wish, although good backups reduce the need for
this. Each individual user can use a cheap disk for his local working copy,
since the master copy in the Repository is safe. If each file you have is 600
MB, network I/O may slow you down some when copying to/from the user's local
working disk :( - no good answer there without smart caching in something other
than CVS. In our company, our sources are typically 500-5000 source files,
maybe up to 50MB. Checking out the whole tree takes some time, but it's not
prohibitive. Check-in's are much faster, since CVS can determine that most
files are not modfied by using the timestamp and skip processing them.
So, I think using a cheap disk (or several) on each individual workstation is
exactly what you want to do! You can't avoid the file duplication or network
I/O traffic using CVS, but this is acceptable for most people. To my mind, the
local working copies are cheap and expendable. Commit "often" to the backed-up
repository (possibly using branches) to avoid losing too much in the event of a
disk crash (these aren't that common anyway). If you absolutely must have
caching in your situation (only you can decide - perhaps try CVS first?), they
you will either have to implement it yourself with symlinks, etc. or pay the $$$
for a complicated CM system.
Good luck!
Alan Thompson
To: Alan Thompson/Orincon@Orincon, "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc:
Subject: RE: Company mode dev. (one disk server) opposed to Open Source mo de
(each has his own disk server) ?
Hi Alan,
That's exactly what I was trying to say
by "company mode" <-> "open source mode".
When you're in Open source mode, you have
a copy of the sources on your local cheap hard disk.
You don't backup it because you know that
hundreds of people all around the world
also have a copy on their cheap disk,
and only a world class disaster could be
dangerous.
When you're in company mode, you don't use
cheap disk on each PC because it becomes
a mess. You use a network file server
- with expensive certified fiber disk -
and a tape backup, because you need to have
a garantee that your downtime will be less
than a day per year. With that kind of
tools, the GB costs you something like $750/GB
Now, if your company is doing chip design,
some of the files are 600MB EACH. The whole
repository is several GB...
You definitively don't want to duplicate this.
A commercial version control/problem tracking tool
like synchronicity offers that kind of cache feature,
but it's expensive (even more than the file server).
That's why I was looking to have CVS work
in a mode of default read-only check-outs
so that we could enhance it later with a disk cache,
or switch to a different cheap tool.
Thanks,
