pohl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Let me ask: what is it about locking and concurrency that makes them
> mutually exclusive? Other software manages to find design patterns that
> allow them to handle configurable policies. (The X11 mantra "mechanism
> not policy" is a great example) Why not CVS?
Small tools. Would you want find and grep to be the same binary? They do
two very different things. Combining the two might offer some rather nice
recursive grep commands, but at the cost of making both programs harder to
maintain as a combined program and at the cost of a breakdown of what
could (and currently is) a clearly defined interface that lets you plug
any other program into find, including another variety of grep.
CVS sucks at locking. Its original design didn't take locking into
account. Adding locking into CVS seems to me to be like adding grep into
find; it adds some functionality for people, but the two concepts *could*
remain orthagonal. Rather than doing that, why not add a -print0 flag and
write a little program called xargs, and then use the existing grep? In
other words, design a really nice locking system with a separate
implementation and figure out a good way to have it *modularly* interact
with CVS via a well-defined interface that could be useful for other
things as well.
I think that if someone did that, they'd encounter much less in the way of
opposition.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
