In what sense is it active?
I've been enlisted in it for quite some time and haven't seen a single
serious commit in a month. The activity has been getting slower
and slower as time goes on. Looking at the cvs diff since 1.10.8, it
looks like you more or less the only one left doing anything with
it.
I'm looking at the trend here:
Feb 19 1999
cvs-1.10.5
May 17 1999 cvs-1.10.6
Jul 29 1999 cvs-1.10.7
Jan 21 2000 cvs-1.10.8
May 17 1999 cvs-1.10.6
Jul 29 1999 cvs-1.10.7
Jan 21 2000 cvs-1.10.8
It is now late April, and the the
current code in CVS is not much different than 1.10.8, granted most of the
commits are bugfixes (good :), but you have like 85% of the entries in
ChangeLog.
I also don't see my decision really
as fragmentation at all, at the very least it might get the people who
apparently control the existing CVS to wake up, and do something with
it.
The worst case I see realistically
with my project over the next few months, is that all the various patches
floating around the net, many of which are good and useful, can be accessible to
a wider audience and in a centralized place, get backed-up automatically by the
folks running sourceforge, and perhaps someday get merged into the real
CVS. This method also solves getting the various patches working together,
integrated, and tested, so the redundancy in work of people running multiple
patches on their local site is eliminated.
The OTHER worst case is that the
'real' CVS continues the way it is going and just dies off, and what I've got
becomes at the very least a support area for fixing bugs and getting minor
features written. By then it will either get real development, or
eventually get replaced with a next generation open-source source
management tool, which is inevitably going to happen someday.
Right now we have ignored emails, and
several documented aliases of which have turned into blackholes, which both
translate into ignored patches. This mailing list lags 90 minutes every
time I post to it which really hurts its usefulness. I'm sure that can get
fixed with some administrative effort, but its beyond my control.
I love the program, I've been using
it for quite a few years. I just have a giant itch to scratch and nowhere
to go, as do a few others. I actually plan on real CVS becoming active
again. I plan to only take patches based against 1.10.8 and any future
official CVS releases, which will help quite a bit in getting them back-ported
over in the real CVS project if it ever happens. If that doesn't happen,
well then RCVS becomes the 'real deal'. win-win if you ask me, the GPL is
magic like that :)
- Sean
P.S.
A few people have mentioned to me
to'try not to step on toes', well I'm trying hard not too, but you can talk to
death about a problem all day and never get anything done. That is
extremely frustrating to me as a developer, and I'd rather take the approach of
'get some results, write some code' then worry about it(back-merging) later if I
need to. Just think of Renegade CVS as a giant open-community sandbox
:)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Sean Cavanaugh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: Renegade CVS
> >
> > I've decided its past time to setup an active CVS repository for CVS, so
> > I've created my own on sourceforge called 'Renegade CVS', the project name
> > is rcvs.
>
> If people want to fork CVS that's OK with me, but I hasten to point out
> that there *is* an active CVS repository (at cvs.cyclic.com), a group of
> developers, and ongoing maintenance.
>
> -Larry Jones
>
> I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts. -- Calvin
>
