[ On Tuesday, February 15, 2000 at 18:10:16 (-0800), Paul Sander wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVS File Locking
>
> Keep in mind that the choice is to decide which change disappears
> into the ether, and the answer may be a very impractical "neither".
> It would be better to avoid the situation where such a choice is
> required.
Yes, of course. The solution in that case is trivial (though perhaps
undesirable -- but, TANSTAAFL): simply re-do one of the changes using
the other as a baseline to start from.
> I would like to hear about another method that avoids the choice I've
> described above that doesn't rely on serialized development. I, personally,
> don't know of one, but then you might know something I don't.
The other method, described just above, has been in use long before
sophisticated version control tools existed.
> The key here is "in their experience". Their source files fit a very
> narrow standard, one that doesn't fit many real-world projects that were
> initiated in the decade or so since that paper was written.
Ah, but in the real world (at least that portion that can make the best
use of a tool like CVS) source files are almost always text files and
most computer scientists agree that version control should be done only
on the source files in order to maintain a hygienic development
environment.
A better question is to ask why some language developers fail to think
of the issues of change management and heterogeneous development
environments when they devise their code storage file formats. The
person who devised VisualBASIC files should have very nasty things done
to him/her for all eternity. There are more VB programmers than any
other kind and they've all be forced into the purgatory of having bad
version control because of this insanity. Perhaps they should be there
for other reasons, but this isn't one of them! The next person who
develops an integrated programming environment and leaves out the change
management side of things should have a million sharp-pointed binary
changes jabbed into them!
> I'm sure that
> if Prisma required more than a few files that didn't fit that standard, CVS
> would somehow support them.
I seriously doubt it. CVS is what it is only because it limits its
solution domain to a practical scope.
> Maybe they did, and relegated their ownership
> to a very small group of people who practiced serial development informally;
> such efforts would likely have been omitted from the paper for any of a
> number of reasons.
Why don't you ask?
Better yet why don't you find out why almost all source code control
systems make the assumption that source files are "text" files? :-)
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
