Darren J Moffat wrote:
> 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.
>
> I think this is a VERY bad idea. We the OpenSolaris or Sun ARC have
> no business telling people which SCM to choose. We didn't put a note
> in the SVN man pages saying that Mercurial is better (which for some
> subset of us it is) nor do I think we should modify the CVS
> communities pages to tell Solaris/OpenSolaris that they are advised
> against using CVS.
Ah, but there is an important consideration here. Our (Sun/OpenSolaris)
ability to properly provide support for CVS is somewhat limited (both
because of limitations in CVS itself, and because we don't use it
ourselves, and because there is little community support remaining for
it). I therefore think we do ourselves and our users a service if we
gently point out that there are newer alternatives which will be better
supported (by us), and which are free of some of the worst of the
limitations in CVS.
<heresy>
Of course, as others have pointed out, the folks who really need CVS
(because they are already using it in projects) have already
downloaded/installed it, and have little need for it to be
"integrated". Given that, I do wonder how meritous its integration into
Solaris is. But then again, I don't necessarily agree that there is a
pressing need for Sun to deliver 4 or more SCMs (hg, svn, cvs, teamware,
and don't forget just plain old sccs and rcs!), any more than there is a
pressing need to deliver OpenWindows, CDE, Gnome/JDS, XFCE, and KDE all
at the same time.
</heresy>
-- Garrett
