On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 11:30:38AM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Adam Turoff wrote: > > > *: Sarathy tells me that Perforce sucks at maintaining thousands of > > anonymous checkouts, while CVS doesn't mind at all. This is a perfect > > reason to use anon CVS vs. Perforce, but does not require that Perforce be > > ditched in favor of CVS, only that an anon CVS gateway be maintained. > > Will this anonymous gateway have all the relevant meta-data? Will it look, > to a user of the gateway, like the live repository is CVS when they go > hunting through metadata? Since there is no anonymous gateway, the answer is a superposition of: 1) Yes, that's the whole point 2) No, it doesn't exist yet 3) Maybe, if it's implemented properly 4) Maybe not, since Perforce is differently featureful :-) Sarathy and I talked about the possibility of setting something up that was automated. If there's a frequent rsync with commits into a parallel CVS repository, then the first (and most important thing) that is lost is who actually made any specific update; all changes are made by 'cvs-bot' or somesuch. Other approaches have been talked about, like Simon's Perforce-like front end to CVS, and Barrie's generalized interface to Perforce/CVS/BitKeeper that should be able to pretend a Perforce repository looks like CVS to a CVS client. The first approach is easiest to implement and only gets at the spirit of the problem - anonymous CVS access to the tree. Tracking the Perforce change numbers shouldn't be a huge issue, but losing ownership of who's changing the source (via 'cvs annotate') is a pretty big loss. In all fairness, I haven't spent many cycles trying to figure out how to fix that. If we're talking about ~30 committers or less, it shouldn't be too horrific. Z.