Jim Cheetham wrote:Indeed - that's why I specified my shared server. We have a dozen root-capable admins, spread over 5 or 6 timezones. There is no useful out-of-band communications channel, so locking works well.Actually, CVS might be overkill. On one shared server, we use RCS to manage locking and rollback on config files. Locking is actually more important than rollback.
That depends on your situation. If there is only you working on a file then rollback is likely to be more important.
And isn't CVS just a wrapper for RCS?Yep. RCS is like any decent unix tool - pretty limited, but comprehensive within its domain. CVS extends RCSs domain to trees of directories, but has to kludge/compromise to do so. Hence subversion, which I haven't really played with ...
diff is one of the most important tools in the open source world.
Without it, we would be struggling to check for changes that are bad or malicious.
Swiftly followed by patch (one of Larry Wall's earliest hacks), which merges diffs back into the file, semi-intelligently. Which made wide-scale publishing of changes in a low-bandwidth world possible. It's still the basis for some software licenses (i.e. you must distribute un-modified sources, but can include patches)
-jim
