Andrew Gabriel wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> I have two questions:
>>
>> 1) Given that pretty much the entire FOSS universe seems to be moving
>> away or have already moved away from, CVS, should we perhaps consider
>> integration as Obsolete, with some suitable note in the man pages or
>> other docs recommending the use of alternatives such as SVN or Hg?
>
> CVS is more extensively used than just the FOSS universe -- I've come
> across (and in some cases, worked for) a good number of customers who
> use it for their own products/projects. I cannot imagine any of them
> ever converting to another SCM in the lifetime of their products, and
> the inclusion of CVS tools would make Solaris slightly easier to use
> for them.
>
> A note on the manpage that new projects should consider svn or hg
> instead might be a good idea, but marking it obsolete would seem to me
> to significantly devalue the purpose for adding it.
Why? Obsolete acts as guidance to folks choosing it, that it will get
reduced levels of support (certainly true! CVS isn't actively sustained
anymore -- the CVS maintainers have, I believe, moved to the SVN
project), and may in the future be removed (which is a real
possibility.) Someday in the future, we might want to be able to stop
including CVS, if only because we find we don't have the ability to
properly support it. Obsolete leaves that option open, without going
through undue pain and suffering.
Don't get me wrong -- I've used CVS quite a bit -- in fact when I left
Tadpole, we were still using it for our Solaris and Sun Ray source
trees. NetBSD still uses it as well -- though they periodically
reexamine alternatives because there is a lot of dissatisfaction with
CVS' limitations.
And in any case, its just a suggestion on my part. The project team is
free to take it, or ignore it altogether.
-- Garrett
