Win32 M$ wrote:
> Dear Laine Stump,
>
>> Oddly, http://www.wincvs.org points people at this mailing list (the CVS
>> mailing list) when they have questions about WinCVS. I'm not sure why
>> they haven't setup their own mailing list, as other frontends, such as
>> tkCVS, have. It would seem to make *a lot* of sense to do so...
>
[...]
>
> So:
> 1. It says "subscribe", it doesn't say "post the questions about
> WinCvs there". I guess the idea is to let the people to 'read' some
> posts to learn about the CVS etc. Also, most of the question about
> WinCvs actually IS a questions about CVS. The problem with
> locking IS A CVS PROBLEM, we wouldn't have to change a single
> line of WinCvs/MacCvs code to make locking working properly,
> the CVS itself screwed it up and it should be fixed this way or
> another IN THE CVS.
You're right about this. If someone were to (try to) "fix" locking
(whatever that
means) then they'd have to make changes to the CVS server. So this could be
seen as a CVS question as opposed to a WinCVS question.
Supposing somebody
wrote a patch to do this, what do you think the chances are that it
would get checked in? Probably not very good. There is one camp
violenltly opposed to locks. I think I'm more in that camp than the
other camp, though I can see there are situations where the concurrent
model doesn't work. (unmergeable files)..
It's true that CVS *is* explicitly designed to work without locking and this
is one
of it's major advantages, and might even be essenitial that locks be absent.
In other words (without having thought about it too hard) I'm saying it
might
not even be _possible_ to add locking to CVS without breaking some part of
it
in a horrible way. (e.g. large scale merging might become an impossible
nightmare with locks held on various branches.) Then again there might be
some way to do it that's not too obtrusive. (Maybe clearcase has all this
already figured out, I don't know...)
And, there's Noel Yap's patch to CVS, which I'm not really all that
familiar with, but as I understand it, it helps keep people from editing
non-mergeable files simultaneously, which is I think, all that people
really want from locks. (I think you can get it at sourceforge in the
Renegade CVS project.)
Of course the other danger with adding locking to CVS is that all the
newbies will just automatically use locking for EVERYTHING, and fail
to even know about the concurrent model. This may be another reason
the original post was greeted with a few less than helpful replies. No
reason
was given why locking was needed in the first place. When a new WinCVS
user comes in asking about locking, it's easy to assume it's because
they don't know what they're doing and they think they need locking
when they really don't, whether such an assumption is justified or not.
(and in the unlikely case you (the original poster) *haven't* tried
non-locking systems you *really* should try the non-locking
method, you'll never go back.)
But back to the topic. I personally don't mind folks posting WinCVS
questions here, but it would be nice if "WinCVS" is in the subject line
someplace. We're seeing more and more WinCVS users as CVS becomes more
popular and more Windows folks start using it. That's fine with me.
but I don't own the list, and it might not be a bad idea to create a list
(or a newsgroup) especially for WinCVS questions.
(Sorry about adding to the flamefest)
-- steve
