David Thornley wrote :
|| "Greg A. Woods" wrote:
|| >
|| > Yup. And the reason is that it would be absolutely against the design
|| > goals of CVS to build a hybrid environment. CVS is designed to *FORCE*
|| > concurrent development. If you don't like it then don't use it (and
|| > don't post stupid arguments about it either).
|| >
|| I don't believe it is designed to do that. It's freely available
|| open-source software, and I've never met anybody in the community
|| that wanted to force somebody to do development in one specific
|| way before. You may want it to do that, but that's a different
|| statement.
I just re-read through the Berliner paper: "CVS II: Parallelizing
Software Development", Brian Berliner, Prisma Inc. I presume that
this is the paper that Greg was referring to in another post in which
he said "read the paper".
It talks about concurrent development. It describes the discovery
that concurrent development actually works, and that they hardly ever
had to do manual merges, and that those manual merges were almost
always simple to resolve.
I didn't see anything that even seemed to say that it was a design
goal to forever onward prohibit any non-concurrent activities from
ever being possible in conjunction with parallel development. It
simply said that concurrent development had proved fully adequate,
having no significant drawbacks and some major advantage.
One item that is of direct significance to many previous discussions
on this mailing list, though, comes from the first paragraph of the
"Summary" section:
Prisma has used cvs since December, 1988. It has evolved to meet
our specific needs of revision and release control. We will make
our code freely available so that others can benefit from out
work, and can enhance cvs to meet broader needs.
That last phrase, in particular, says that the initial design of cvs
was *not* intended to be permanently binding upon future evolution of
cvs. It clearly indicates that the author expected that wider usage
would encounter limitations arising from other groups having
different needs of revision and release control and that cvs would be
changed to meet those needs.
The cvs design is *not* carved in stone. Just because a proposal
does not match the original design goals of cvs does not justify
automatically rejecting it from consideration. Such a proposal must
be considered on its actual merits, rather than the Gospel of the
Design of CVS.
--
Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not | John Macdonald
taking life seriously enough -- Larry Wall | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
