Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
I didn't followed this thread any longer, but given that a friend of mine pointed it to me yesterday and I am explicity called in... D. Baushke (one of the original CVS developers from 20 odd years ago) pointed out recently on the gnu.cvs.help newsgroup that in his opinion CVS should ALWAYS be built from source by the person installing it. If you are Ah, good, that settles all :). Wasn't CVSNT born because the CVS guys didn't bother to add any feature the four of them didn't need, and thereby the whole Universe shouldn't need? That just shows how gnu people are just *nix talibans without a clue about the other OS, which unluckily runs on a lot of PCs , most Windows users simply does not have all the tools they need to build from source, and many Windows developer are not Visual C developers and do not have an environment to build form source. GNU guys are perfectly happy if their software doesn't run on the Evil OS, but people selling sofware may have a different viewpoint about their customer base. Windows sysadmins are not used to build software from sources - and I will fire any sysadmin that would install *development tools* on a production server. Anyway it explains why some developers abandoned the project and went on to write Subversion - noone of them AFAIK believe true open source software should be build from pure sources on a pure OS never touched by Bill Gates. The advertising message has been carefully designed so that the majority of the people who will be annoyed by it are those who we hoped to annoy: those I am not against that message appearing on screen. It shouldn not have been written in the log, suddendly, almost without notice. to spend on 'non-core' tools (such as GUIs) when these tools are irrelevant without the Verstion Control engine. E.g.: if Luigi D. Sandon now chooses to switch the versioning engine to Subversion then those client tools are irrelevant. Those client tools are not irrelevant at all. That's your basic flaw that could undermine your whole business model. Without them, believe me, a command-line-only cvs would have very few users under Windows. Most Windows developers are not used to command line tools, most developers were used to SourceSafe or other version control system that have a GUI. Switching them to CVS would have been very difficult, required a lot of training - and a lot of mistakes needing to be fixed. Without WinCVS, Tortoise and WinMerge - all tools that you too offer with your suite, I guess CVSNT wouldn't have gone far. And because most tools started to support more than one backend (i.e. Eclipse, CrossVC, and many others) or, like Tortoise, came in different flavours, they make the engine irrelevant, perhaps. Given my budget constraint unluckily I am forced to choose to buy what improves my team work, and a simpler interaction with the VC engine means faster work and less errors. That's what drives me when buying tools - if I don't see much added value but to get rid of a nag message in buying software, well, I look elsewhere. - no one of us is paid to support open source projects, sorry. I tried to share my little knowledge of CVSNT here to help the project - I am not a C developer thereby I can't help improving the code-, until we have a budget that would allow us to do more, but if that's no longer welcome I can find something better to do in my spare time. I contributed and contribute to other open source project, but of course it doesn't matter... Free Open Source CVSNT every year can afford to pay a little towards its Unluckily, you don't accept donations like many other open source projects do, and just want to sell licenses. Right now I am not able to build a business case to justify it - the answer would be let's migrate to Subversions - same features and still free. As long as I keep on using CVSNT I hope one day it could offer enough to be an appealing purchase or our budget is large enough to accomodate supporting some open source project (I can't see why we shouldn't support others too), if we are forced to migrate to another tool, well, it's very difficult we could return back. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Luigi, Thank you for your feedback. We cannot accept donations - there are laws that govern this in most countries and since we are software developers not lawyers it is better for us to stick to developing software; to support the project we invite people to purchase CVS Suite or CM Suite and annual support. How to switch off the advertising is explained in the FAQ: http://march-hare.com/cvspro/faq/faq2.asp#30 Regards, Arthur Barrett ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Luigi, With EVS almost done now I finally had time to reply to the last points you made. Taking the analogy a step further: Luigi (and others) appear to be suggesting Not at all. You choose the Open Source model, not us. It is perfectly valid under the GPL open source license to both charge a fee for the distribution of the software and also to advertise within it. Tony and I have both recently posted to this thread indicating we are perfectly happy with the open source model. Are you sure you understand what the open SOURCE model is? Budget constraint does not allow us to buy whatever we like just to support good development. No - but we the developers can encourage you the user to support the tools that may be a critical part of your infrastructure. You cannot 'buy' CVSNT, but you can 'pay' for it (in various ways) - it's one of the geatest freedoms that the GPL gives people. Again, I am telling you how some customers perceive your package. And that is appreciated. Comments from other people in this thread about the considerable value of CVS Suite are also appreciated. be forced somehow to buy a CVS suite, We are not forcing anyone. The software is open source - you have the source code, we have also provided ways to turn off the advertising (see FAQ). prices, and at 4000 euro per ten users your competitors are At current exchance rates it's less than 2400 Euro (once you provide a VAT Number) and is the cheapest commercial SCM on the market (when priced over 3 years) and includes 2 hour Service Level Agreement on the telephone support (by far the best SLA for any product costing less than EUR5000 per user plus 15% maintenance). However we deliberately did not advertise 'CVS Pro' since Sales of 'CVS Pro' are already quite healthy (we expect a smaller percentage of users will find value in CVS Pro). We are advertising CVS Suite and deliberately targeting a minimum of sales target of: 1 x 1 copy per 100 downloads. Based on feedback in this thread alone a higher number of those who are downloading CVSNT will find considerable value in 1 copy of Suite. A further percentage of users have been using CVSNT for years and have not responded to previous calls for users to become contributors and whilst they may not find Suite 'more valuable' than the FOSS offering they will find it less annoying and appreciate the continued development and FOSS support. Would you like some support/investment? Set up a way to donate to the project, as many OS project do. It is not possible for an individual or company to collect donations. Donations are heavily regulated by governments. If you want to contribute - buy a copy of a product we have for sale. You're using Apache/PHP/Debian on your cvsnt.com server. Would you like if it printed Page generated with a free version of Apache Web Server with a free version of PHP on a free version of Debian operating system on each page it serves? I wouldn't mind at all - cvsnt.org is a free web site. All the stable downloads require a user visit the march-hare.com web site which runs on a Microsfot Web server running IIS. Regardless of the fact we wouldn't mind such a message - we pay (actual hard cash) for the hosting of those web sites and we trust that the companies we are paying are in turn paying their vendors (or contributing in direct tangible ways to the development of FOSS software). Why don't you pay for RedHat or SuSE to support Linux development? We do - we have these systems internally - along with Windows and HPUX and Solaris and Mac systems all of which we need to pay actual hard cash for (except notably HP who have generously provided us with free hardware and software). Or switch off the message (read the FAQ) None of the methods works yet g They do in my tests - if you are running server and client you need to turn the message off on the server and the client but the FAQ already informs people of that. I was just using CVSNT 2.5.04 yesterday and there are no advertisments in my commit messages. As explained in a previous message, we don't have any SQL Server database nor we plan to have one. And as I have written previously - why not contribute to the EVSCM project and instead of telling the group what you wont use, ie: tell the project what you will use. We have many ideas what the next database is that we'll support (Oracle, Postgres, Sybase) and platform (Solaris 10 Sparc, Solaris 10 Intel, HPUX 11iv3 Itanium, SLES10 x32, SLES10 x64, RHEL5 x32, RHEL5 x64, RHEL Itanium) - and in the absence of any constructive replies we'll make an uninformed choice. Post to the evs newsgroup not the cvsnt newsgroup. Users of Free Software (like CVSNT) have a choice. To financially support the companies who are enhancing Free software (like CVSNT) and not limiting your freedoms by continuing to supply all the source code under the GPL (ie: the work Tony and March Hare have done with changesets,
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Taking the analogy a step further: Luigi (and others) appear to be suggesting Not at all. You choose the Open Source model, not us. I just said that IMHO the value of the actual CVSNT suite is not appealing enough to users. Believe me, I wish I could buy a package with a good SMC from top to bottom. But I need solid reasons to convince my manager, and right now I have not. Budget constraint does not allow us to buy whatever we like just to support good development. Again, I am telling you how some customers perceive your package. If you prefer to think your package is the most competitive, or that users should be forced somehow to buy a CVS suite, of course it's up to you. Unfortunately, I don't see any real value in buying CVSNT at your current prices, and at 4000 euro per ten users your competitors are no longer CVS, SVN or CuteFTP, but are much more capable SCM tools. I am sorry you seem not really inderstanding it - start to compare it with StarTeam or Perforce, or something alike on your web site. Would you like some support/investment? Set up a way to donate to the project, as many OS project do. Or switch to another model, nobody will blame you. Some user will buy, some will migrate to other tools. This is what we are doing: we have added advertising to deliberately target those people who download the installer You're using Apache/PHP/Debian on your cvsnt.com server. Would you like if it printed Page generated with a free version of Apache Web Server with a free version of PHP on a free version of Debian operating system on each page it serves? Why don't you pay for RedHat or SuSE to support Linux development? Or switch off the message (read the FAQ) None of the methods works yet g switch to EVS that doesn't have advertising in the commit message As explained in a previous message, we don't have any SQL Server database nor we plan to have one. And before introducing a wholly new tool I have to test it extensively. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
6) A truly visual and robust Release Manager that supports Unix Try CruiseControl, available both in Java and thus running on any OS, or in a .NET clone. It's open source, not much visual, but it won't just release your code. It will check it out, compile it, run tests, tag your repository and move the result where you like. We're using CruiseControl.NET and although its XML-based configuration script it's not the easiest configuration to perform, it works well. If you need a visual and robust release manager under Windows there are excellent tools like AutomatedBuild Studio or FinalBuilder, just to name two (don't know about FreeBSD, sorry, visual and Unix are often an oxymoron...). Again, if I have to pay money I may prefer a tool that not only does not bind us to a single SCM, but offers greater flexibility, unless the tool that comes with the SCM really outperforms what's available elsewhere, is highly integrated or is really cheap. If I were March-Hare I'd focus on the server (they're doing it already with evs, maybe they could some features in the paid version only), and a good client (multiplatform, if needed), instead of adding three different clients, two of which open source. On this core they could build a suite of SCM software, but looking at what's available on the market - to be really competitive. Right now what's available in the CVS Suite can be easily built with open source tools - and remember most CVSNT customers are developers, they can easily tweak Mantis or write a trigger to get things done - up to modify open source code if neeeded. In our stack right now CVSNT is just the code repository - I may prefer to change it than changing the whole stack above that works well and does not requires CVSNT - alternatives are available. If you are willing to pay, the market often offers more powerful tools - and it looks March-Hare does not take it into account. I understand that if every CVS user starts to pay for it today March-Hare could build great tools tomorrow, but we are users, not investors. We pay for what you offer now, not tomorrow. Sorry. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Hi, I think that the major contribution to CVS of march-hare is the server update. I am tempted after an evaluation am I doing (suggested to me from this topic) to buy smartCVS. No product can be good for everyone but I think that the bundle from march-hare is , as cleary explained by others, a glue of free products with little or no added value. The server instead adds value to CVS. In my opinion server could cost something eventually with less irritation (money speaking) from community. If you want to finance your server development by th mean of client sales, this is a good idea -but- build a good cvs atomic client which can have a sufficient commercial value, and we will buy it. smartCVS is 79 USD (about 60 euro for me) and it seems it deliver its value. Regards -- Fabio D'Alfonso 'Your Partner in Business' cell. +39.348.059.40.22 web: www.fabiodalfonso.com email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] fax: +39.06.874.599.581 From: Howard Ha [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 2:41 AM To: cvsnt users list cvsnt@cvsnt.org Subject: Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages Just wanted to add some feedback and maybe ask a few questions. Keep in mind I'm thinking from the perspective of a small team of 4-10 people working with perhaps 20-25 cvsnt repositories. I accidentally only sent this to Tony so I am sending to the list now, with some edits to portions that don't across as I intended: You make it sound like it's a bunch of free stuff thrown together. In the 4+ years that I have been to the march hare site this is EXACTLY the impression I come away with when I read about the paid version of CVS Suite. 1) tortoise and wincvs are both free software, and the pages do not seem to go into any detail (especially with screenshots) explaining how the paid versions differ. Some of the features you promote look to be ALREADY present in the free versions :| (commit by bugid in tortoise). Integrating with Mantis can be done with the free software, I'm not sure why this is advertised as a paid feature? 2) Which leads to: you mention bug tracking but WinCVS doesn't support bugid natively (unless the paid version does?), and tortoisecvs supports bug id's in its free version. 3) the manual may be valuable, but there is no information that entices me to even want to read it for free, much less buy it. The description doesn't convince me or any of my teammates it would help save even 30minutes of work in our lifetime. There's just NOT ENOUGH information about what's inside to make it interesting. For example, I recently bought the excellent High Performance MySQL book published by O'reilly because on browsing it I know it definitely covers some solutions to some very important problems. I have no idea if any of the challenges that I have seen with cvsnt are covered by the book. Perhaps a rewrite of the marketing materials to cover specific topics that experienced users might care about. For instance, in the list that you provided in the materials it says Fundamentals of CM, CVS Architecture, Designing your Solution, Setting up CVSNT Server, Server Administration, Command Line CVSNT, Troubleshooting, Administrative files, Installing Integrations and Client Connection and Configuration. Of that entire sentence the only thing that even remotely sounds interesting is Installing Integrations and I have no idea what that even really means. The only other thing that really intrigues me is Detailed client workflows are described for WinCVS, TortoiseCVS, CVS Suite Studio and Release Manager but the problem is I already had a very good workflow and the descriptions of CVS Suite Studio and Release Manager do NOT make me want to include them in my workflow. 4) CVS Visual Studio .NET Integration integration does nothing for our team. I feel like I'm considering paying for a product where a huge selling point has zero value for us. 5) Release Manager: I personally believe this is one of the most valuable tools that CVS Suite has, but I have no idea how good it is. The sparse description reads like a pamphlet written by Marketing specialists who have never used the thing before. It spends most of its verbiage on bragging about how good it is rather than actually telling us what it can do. Let ME decide how good it is by telling me the details of how it works. The only screenshot available shows a very limited screen which leaves the following questions unanswered: a) I see a schedule manager, but I see no indication of how to schedule to upload to specific servers? b) Does this tool even support SSH deployment to live servers using SSH keys? It seems to talk about FTP then throw in SSH and SSL only as afterthoughts c) How does this tool interact with multiple deployment servers? Does it have a connection manager? d) Does the tool have a project manager where it has saved settings for different projects? Each
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
I always resisted my developers will to move to Subversion, you just gave them another reason. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Luigi D. Sandon wrote: But of course it won't work if you use a GUI on top of CVS that doesn't support it - unless one recompiles them too. And as I noted in a previous post, the lack of a good GUI (IMHO Tortoise isn't, saw too many users did the wrong thing due to the shell integration, nor Workspace Manager interface looks up to the task) is one of the reasons I have issues to build a case to buy CVS. Each version of GUI will use the cvsnt version it is written for, generally. By the time a Tortoise is released for 2.5.04 it'll be using either switch depending on what Torsten wants to do with it. Clients which use their own code like eclipse don't even have the issue. I've never seen a completely seamless GUI for any system.. SmartCVS is pretty good if you haven't tried it. Really, there are so many clients out there that it's not something that really factors into it.. and there are as many different ways of interacting with a repository as there are clients. Everyone has their favourites - the key to making it all work is at the server side. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Thanks all on your feedback about the advertising in the commit messages. I have created a new FAQ to make it clearer how to disable this: http://www.march-hare.com/cvspro/faq/faq2.asp#30 Let me also take this opportunity to clear up some issues raised in this thread: 1) we are no longer satified with the open source model. Free Open Source Software is a very valuable commodity and allows developers to customise code (and learn from looking at well developed mature code) so that they can implement optimal software based systems. That model of software development is important and satisfying to both Tony Hoyle and myself and is unaffected by a few lines that add annoying behaviour. Mark D. Baushke (one of the original CVS developers from 20 odd years ago) pointed out recently on the gnu.cvs.help newsgroup that in his opinion CVS should ALWAYS be built from source by the person installing it. If you are building from source when you install then removing a line or two is pretty easy. 2) I bought one copy of Suite to support the project. Those people such as Jan Keirse who supported March Hare Software by purchasing one or more CVS Suite licenses can use the CVS Suite code which does NOT include the advertising and is much more stable and includes features such as changeset/bug from message. In fact Jan Keirse can use the one copy purchased for as many users desired provided that the commercial components like Workspace Manager, Bugzilla/Mantis/Jira Integration etc are only used by a single named user (and they don't expect us to answer 100 users worth of questions for the price of 1 license). Furthermore we have also donated copies of CVS Suite to our more regular contributors (though if you are a 'regular contributor' who as done so in the past 12 months then we probably have not caught up with you yet). 3) WinCVS and TortoiseCVS do not support the -M notation The 'combined client' installer includes our own TortoiseCVS and WinCVS builds and these *should* both use the -M workaround, but currently do not, I intend to fix that next week. 4) We are annoying users The advertising message has been carefully designed so that the majority of the people who will be annoyed by it are those who we hoped to annoy: those who have not contributed to the Free Open Source software development (in code, support, documentation or testing) - or put it another way - those who download the MSI and never contact us again. 5) Annoying users wont help make sales I personally would have very much preferred to avoid having to take such an overt advertising measure as adding advertising to the commit message, however the thread titled 'Help the CVSNT Project' between me and Luigi D. Sandon made it very clear to me that organisations who use CVSNT as the cornerstone of their software configuration management process are choosing to spend on 'non-core' tools (such as GUIs) when these tools are irrelevant without the Verstion Control engine. E.g.: if Luigi D. Sandon now chooses to switch the versioning engine to Subversion then those client tools are irrelevant. 6) EVS Since Tony has spent a large part of his personal time as well as his professional time writing EVS he and I would like to see open source CVSNT users begin to migrate to EVS if possible, and I may even change the advertising so it does not insert when using EVS Server from CVSNT client so there is another reason to switch. EVS allows developers to use Subversion or CVS/CVSNT clients and will hopefully combat the misinformation out there about CVS vs CVSNT vs SVN. If you use only the 'CVSNT' side of EVS then it is all open source (though we are not currently providing an MSI for that), and if you are a developer who wants to write a Version Control system then the EVSAPI is open source, but if you just want to download and run the .EXE it is NOT open source. 7) In conclusion We have many commercial-only customers who are unnaffected by the advertising, and have been the ones paying for the development of CVSNT for 4 years. I am convinced that the 1.4 million people who only download the Free Open Source CVSNT every year can afford to pay a little towards its future development, and if a good percentage do we could afford to remove the advertising again in just a few weeks.I will review how well the advertising is working and determine any changes over the next month or so (such as Clóvis Garcia Marcondes's suggestion to have the client -m work like -M). Regards, Arthur Barrett ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Really, there are so many clients out there that it's not something that really factors into it.. and there are as many different ways of interacting with a repository as there are clients. Everyone has their favourites - the key to making it all work is at the server side. Probably most *nix developers feel at home with the command line client. On the Windows side, I've listened to many complains about the lack of a good GUI towards CVS. I know that ther are many, but as long as the better one are commercial product, as I already wrote Barret, companies will spend their money in the GUIs if the open source ones like Tortoise or WinCVS don't fit their needs, and won't buy the commercial version of CVSNT because it's free and they already paid the GUI to make it work. Most managers who sign the bill don't understand very well why we should by a VCS and then buy a GUI separately. IMHO if CVSNT Pro offered a very good GUI which can take advantage of the advanced features - developed internally or licensed - the perceived value would increase a lot - company would have to buy one tool to get everything, like most commercial VCS offer. What's inside the box now, customized version of open-source projects, looks not enough, IMHO. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Luigi D. Sandon wrote: it's free and they already paid the GUI to make it work. Most managers who sign the bill don't understand very well why we should by a VCS and then buy a GUI separately. Most peopple don't buy the GUI separately, they generally use what they have.. eg. Visual Studio or Eclipse. We also ship Tortoise which is a very good GUI that beginners have no problems getting used to, and of course Workspace Manager that handles the more advanced features. IMHO if CVSNT Pro offered a very good GUI which can take advantage of the advanced features - developed internally or licensed - the perceived value would increase a lot - company would have to buy one tool to get everything, like most commercial VCS offer. What's inside the box now, customized version of open-source projects, looks not enough, IMHO. You *do* only have to buy one tool. CVS Suite contains everything you need. You make it sound like it's a bunch of free stuff thrown together. Nothing could be further from the truth. It contains extra features - such as bug tracking and visual studio integration. The ebook is worth the price alone IMO. Even the packaged apps are customised to work better with our system have more features that aren't in the free releases (we do contribute changes back to the projects but some of it is too specific to cvsnt to make it into any generic releases). Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Fabio D'Alfonso wrote: Hi, just to say that I agree completely with Luigi. You should go proprietary, if you are no longer satified with open source model. We really like the open source model.. evs is also mostly open source and will likely become more so over time. Adding a small (removable) advert to cvsnt does not change this one bit. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Most peopple don't buy the GUI separately, they generally use what they have.. eg. Visual Studio or Eclipse. We also ship Tortoise which is a Those using VS or Eclipse - which are not the only development environments on the planet... and I am afraid our IDE is going to target Subversion. very good GUI that beginners have no problems getting used to, and of It's a GUI beginners usually fire in their feet with - because I saw many who don't understand the difference between the file system and the repository, and think that copying or deleting a file should be mirrored in the repository too. I prefer to make them work in a separate environement so they know it's now a Windows folder. While most developers hate working inside Explorer - or install shell extensions. You *do* only have to buy one tool. CVS Suite contains everything you need. Sorry, I don't believe so. It does not contain what I need, or I would have bought it already. Nothing could be further from the truth. It contains extra features - such as bug tracking and visual studio integration. Bug tracking could be setup easily by any experienced CVS user. We did. We don't use VS, thereby visual studio integration is useless for us - just paying for something we don't use. The ebook is worth the price alone IMO. For beginners I agree, again, experienced user can do without. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
-M message Log message. It looks it does not work. I get the message anyway. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
exactly the same things as always - I'm against any kind of crippling or time limiting in software where people may be relying on it continuing to work. They would just simply stick to older version until migrating to something else - as some will do now. I do not like noise in commit messages, which also get stored in Mantis, thereby I am rolling back the last update. We will stick to 2.5.03 until we decide what to do. Frankly, if you can't sustain the open source model anymore I'd suggest you to go proprietary starting with evs. You won't improve sales annoying users. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
commit. There are even multiple ways to disable that if you dig around the source a bit. Here's one (just run cvs - H commit) -m message Log message (the log message will include an advert). -M message Log message. But of course it won't work if you use a GUI on top of CVS that doesn't support it - unless one recompiles them too. And as I noted in a previous post, the lack of a good GUI (IMHO Tortoise isn't, saw too many users did the wrong thing due to the shell integration, nor Workspace Manager interface looks up to the task) is one of the reasons I have issues to build a case to buy CVS. IMHO, the perceived value of the paid version should be much more of a bunch of open source software available elsewhere bundled, and a support/manual option many long time and skilled user can do without. -- Luigi D. Sandon ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Just wanted to add some feedback and maybe ask a few questions. Keep in mind I'm thinking from the perspective of a small team of 4-10 people working with perhaps 20-25 cvsnt repositories. I accidentally only sent this to Tony so I am sending to the list now, with some edits to portions that don't across as I intended: You make it sound like it's a bunch of free stuff thrown together. In the 4+ years that I have been to the march hare site this is EXACTLY the impression I come away with when I read about the paid version of CVS Suite. 1) tortoise and wincvs are both free software, and the pages do not seem to go into any detail (especially with screenshots) explaining how the paid versions differ. Some of the features you promote look to be ALREADY present in the free versions :| (commit by bugid in tortoise). Integrating with Mantis can be done with the free software, I'm not sure why this is advertised as a paid feature? 2) Which leads to: you mention bug tracking but WinCVS doesn't support bugid natively (unless the paid version does?), and tortoisecvs supports bug id's in its free version. 3) the manual may be valuable, but there is no information that entices me to even want to read it for free, much less buy it. The description doesn't convince me or any of my teammates it would help save even 30minutes of work in our lifetime. There's just NOT ENOUGH information about what's inside to make it interesting. For example, I recently bought the excellent High Performance MySQL book published by O'reilly because on browsing it I know it definitely covers some solutions to some very important problems. I have no idea if any of the challenges that I have seen with cvsnt are covered by the book. Perhaps a rewrite of the marketing materials to cover specific topics that experienced users might care about. For instance, in the list that you provided in the materials it says Fundamentals of CM, CVS Architecture, Designing your Solution, Setting up CVSNT Server, Server Administration, Command Line CVSNT, Troubleshooting, Administrative files, Installing Integrations and Client Connection and Configuration. Of that entire sentence the only thing that even remotely sounds interesting is Installing Integrations and I have no idea what that even really means. The only other thing that really intrigues me is Detailed client workflows are described for WinCVS, TortoiseCVS, CVS Suite Studio and Release Manager but the problem is I already had a very good workflow and the descriptions of CVS Suite Studio and Release Manager do NOT make me want to include them in my workflow. 4) CVS Visual Studio .NET Integration integration does nothing for our team. I feel like I'm considering paying for a product where a huge selling point has zero value for us. 5) Release Manager: I personally believe this is one of the most valuable tools that CVS Suite has, but I have no idea how good it is. The sparse description reads like a pamphlet written by Marketing specialists who have never used the thing before. It spends most of its verbiage on bragging about how good it is rather than actually telling us what it can do. Let ME decide how good it is by telling me the details of how it works. The only screenshot available shows a very limited screen which leaves the following questions unanswered: a) I see a schedule manager, but I see no indication of how to schedule to upload to specific servers? b) Does this tool even support SSH deployment to live servers using SSH keys? It seems to talk about FTP then throw in SSH and SSL only as afterthoughts c) How does this tool interact with multiple deployment servers? Does it have a connection manager? d) Does the tool have a project manager where it has saved settings for different projects? Each of my projects may be deployed to a different server or servers. Within each project can I deploy to a different set of servers? (Eg Project Google has a staging server and 10 production servers, I want to first deploy to staging, then deploy to production servers, can I set up the Release Manager to handle these two scenarios without having to continually entering server info, server passwords, etc?) e) The wording of the page seems to suggest this tool has to exist on the deployment site. Well that has me worried, all my servers are Unix based. Does this mean the tool is worthless for those of us running Unix servers? I thought it was a tool that runs from your local machine and pushes changes out to other servers. See how many unanswered questions there are in Release Manager alone? I'm a person who visits March Hare maybe 10 times a year to see if there's any updates to WinCVS and other tools and yet I come away each time unsure what the software even does and whether it even works for my team. Just look at the TINY and fuzzy picture at the top of the Release Manager page
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Howard, Thanks for your detailed reply. I had pretty much already stated everything I was going to say - and I think addressed all the points you've raied - but since you went to some effort to write so much I think you deserve some further explanatory comment, though I've probably not had time to write as much as you deserve. a) I see a schedule manager, but I see no indication of how to schedule . . . Unix servers? I thought it was a tool that runs from your local machine and pushes changes out to other servers. If you have specific questions about our commecial product please contact our sales team. The current release of RM is a windows only 'pull' design since all of the functions you are asking for can be performed using existing Operating System tools in linux/hpux/solaris and 'push' designs a generally unsafe to provide as 'out of the box' solutions (ie: we'd provide 'push' designed with on site consulting). Then I'm told that the book alone is worth the price of admission, but it covers topics that are already DONE in our team. From your description of your use of CVSNT and your reaction to the product literature I think we can both see it is not designed to appeal to you. However other long time users of CVSNT have already posted in this thread that they did learn stuff from the eBook when they bought it. The CVS Suite marketing material is designed for people who are familiar with using VSS. Or to put another way - the CVS Suite marketing material is designed for people who download WinCVS and say 'this is not what I want'. My goal is to add to the numbers of people people who are using good software configuration management tools - which necessitates presenting information in a new 'simpler' - 'less technical' way. As an addendum, I wanted to list some very real problems that I would buy CVS Suite to solve if only I knew with confidence they were even addressed I think what you and many other 'technically advanced' users want is CM Server ie: EVS. The very first version may not look very pretty but it does support both SVN and CVSNT clients and has 'svn style' repository revision id's and we'll add to the number of supported clients (TeamSystem will be next and also to the prettyness of the GUI and the number of workflows the GUI supports. 1) WinCVS is old and outdated. The 'Suite Studio' (previously called Workspace Manager) is our 'replacement' for WinCVS - including it's support for flat view - however if you love WinCVS then you probably wont like 'Suite Studio' and are probably best off continuing to use WinCVS. The CVS Suite version of CVSNT already has support for 'message to bug number' so that includes support for WinCVS, but we recommend using Suite Studio for things like promote and merge by bug id since we wont be adding those to WinCVS any time soon. Of course we listen to our customers - so if tomorrow 1000 people bought 1-3 copies each of CVS Suite and 400 of them wrote to the help desk all saying that WinCVS was the most important part of the Suite for them and that their 'top 5 ideas' were 1, 2, 3, 4 5 then of course we'd listen and deliver on that in CVS Suite 2009. Anyway that's my feedback. I love cvsnt and appreciate all the work that has been put into it. The 'point' of our recent advertising push is all about the ability for us to continue to fund innovation in the core FOSS product and not at all about whether the CVS Suite commercial add-ons add value for you. If CVSNT is core to work that a person is paid a wage/salary/income for then I want to encourage that person to support the tool that is helping them to earn an income. Many other organisations keep innovation out of the FOSS product and spend the majority of their hours and money on marketing and innovating only in the non FOSS 'add on' tools. March Hare Software have spent more time and money every year on the core CVSNT/EVS projects than on the 'add ons' by far more than 2:1 - and yes it does show in the comprehensiveness of the 'core' product and the relative lack of comprehensiveness of the 'add ons'. Tony and I are certainly not going to walk away from CVSNT, however an option open to us is exactly what you appear to be advocating for in your e-mail: we'll start to add all these features to the 'add on commercial tools' and so that they become indispensable. However I prefer the path we've already followed, with adding changesets, and audit and access control lists and multi-site repositories to the core FOSS product so that it truly remains Free and Open Source and relying on our users to see the value in supporting the team that provide it and purchase support and the 'officially supported' versions. The features that we've added to the 'core' FOSS product are exactly the ones that you say you value the most. Now are you (and everyone else who uses CVSNT) going to encourage us to continue to put them in the 'core' or are you going to
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Clóvis Garcia Marcondes wrote: Hi, After installed the new 2.5.04 CVSNT Server (Free) the text below is been inserted into my commit messages: Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Server. Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ Is there anyway to disable that or I will have to go back to the 2.5.03? You could just buy a copy. The development, testing and support of cvsnt (and evs) takes up a lot of time and money. The software is then given away free, no strings attached. For this all you have to do is cope with an unobtrusive message on commit. There are even multiple ways to disable that if you dig around the source a bit. Arthur once calculated that if 1% of the people who download cvsnt each year bought 1 copy, we'd be able to hire 3 programmers. That would mean a much better product, better support, and it would still be free for the 99%. It pains me to have to do something even so minor.. I'd love everything to be free but unfortunately I haven't yet managed to perfect a way to live without food or a roof over my head. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Clóvis Garcia Marcondes wrote: Tony, I got your point but should be nice at least to advise when you change the way the product works. I just asked because I´m testing the new version together with the CVS Suite Trial exactly to see if it is interesting for me to buy the comercial version and thought it could be a side effect of that. But if it is a new March Hare policy you should at least warned about that. It was mentioned in the release notes for the release candidates and the final release notes. It's really not a change in the way the product works.. it still does exactly the same things as always - I'm against any kind of crippling or time limiting in software where people may be relying on it continuing to work. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Hi, I appreciate very much the effort you made to enhance cvs. This shareware like change in the policy to add messages in the software, will not get expected results, in my opinion. I unfortunately expect that this will reinforce migration to other tools like, but not only svn that your efforts rightly contained in the past years, adding missing features to make cvs better. Also the most of people will stay on previous versions, unless you'll remove from downloadables. Thanks -- Fabio D'Alfonso 'Your Partner in Business' cell. +39.348.059.40.22 web: www.fabiodalfonso.com email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] fax: +39.06.874.599.581 From: Tony Hoyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 12:57 PM To: cvsnt@cvsnt.org Subject: Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages Clóvis Garcia Marcondes wrote: Hi, After installed the new 2.5.04 CVSNT Server (Free) the text below is been inserted into my commit messages: Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Server. Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ Is there anyway to disable that or I will have to go back to the 2.5.03? You could just buy a copy. The development, testing and support of cvsnt (and evs) takes up a lot of time and money. The software is then given away free, no strings attached. For this all you have to do is cope with an unobtrusive message on commit. There are even multiple ways to disable that if you dig around the source a bit. Arthur once calculated that if 1% of the people who download cvsnt each year bought 1 copy, we'd be able to hire 3 programmers. That would mean a much better product, better support, and it would still be free for the 99%. It pains me to have to do something even so minor.. I'd love everything to be free but unfortunately I haven't yet managed to perfect a way to live without food or a roof over my head. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
It's not a real concern to us, as we purchased a licence a few weeks ago. Although, my personal opinion is that it becomes now adware instead of shareware. Also, I expect there will be ad-free builds available very soon from other websites than march-hare. Met vriendelijke groeten, Cordialement, Regards, DRIES FEYS ICT-DEPARTMENT Software quality Systems: Senior Software Engineer Fabio D'Alfonso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/11/2008 15:47 Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To cvsnt@cvsnt.org cc Subject Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages Hi, I appreciate very much the effort you made to enhance cvs. This shareware like change in the policy to add messages in the software, will not get expected results, in my opinion. I unfortunately expect that this will reinforce migration to other tools like, but not only svn that your efforts rightly contained in the past years, adding missing features to make cvs better. Also the most of people will stay on previous versions, unless you'll remove from downloadables. Thanks -- Fabio D'Alfonso 'Your Partner in Business' cell. +39.348.059.40.22 web: www.fabiodalfonso.com email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] fax: +39.06.874.599.581 From: Tony Hoyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 12:57 PM To: cvsnt@cvsnt.org Subject: Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages Clóvis Garcia Marcondes wrote: Hi, After installed the new 2.5.04 CVSNT Server (Free) the text below is been inserted into my commit messages: Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Server. Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ Is there anyway to disable that or I will have to go back to the 2.5.03? You could just buy a copy. The development, testing and support of cvsnt (and evs) takes up a lot of time and money. The software is then given away free, no strings attached. For this all you have to do is cope with an unobtrusive message on commit. There are even multiple ways to disable that if you dig around the source a bit. Arthur once calculated that if 1% of the people who download cvsnt each year bought 1 copy, we'd be able to hire 3 programmers. That would mean a much better product, better support, and it would still be free for the 99%. It pains me to have to do something even so minor.. I'd love everything to be free but unfortunately I haven't yet managed to perfect a way to live without food or a roof over my head. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ DISCLAIMER A HREF=http://www.tvh.be/newen/pages/emaildisclaimer.html; http://www.tvh.be/newen/pages/emaildisclaimer.html /A This message is delivered to all addressees subject to the conditions set forth in the attached disclaimer, which is an integral part of this message. ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
Fabio D'Alfonso wrote: Hi, I appreciate very much the effort you made to enhance cvs. This shareware like change in the policy to add messages in the software, will not get expected results, in my opinion. I unfortunately expect that this will reinforce migration to other tools like, but not only svn that your efforts rightly contained in the past years, adding missing features to make cvs better. Also the most of people will stay on previous versions, unless you'll remove from downloadables. Well it's a tradeoff.. losing some to gain a few who can fund the project. It only affects the builds we make, so the various linux versions etc. will not have the message. We already (I think) told Torsten how to disable it in TortoiseCVS as well. We already posted how to switch it off once on this list already, for the more observant :) Ultimately evs is the answer - its versions are differentiated and the free version is clearly a trial. OTOH it serves a different audience. There's a need for both products to continue, and making people aware that there even *is* a commercial version of cvsnt (given that only about .01% of the users actually frequent this list) is tricker. Tony ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
Re: [cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages
I noticed that this was not made by the Server but the client because I´ve tested over a CVSNT Server 2.5.03 and the same problems occurr. Is there a free client or I´ll have to keep the 2.5.03 client instead o 2.5.04? Clóvis Garcia Marcondes escreveu: Hi, After installed the new 2.5.04 CVSNT Server (Free) the text below is been inserted into my commit messages: Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Server. Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/ Is there anyway to disable that or I will have to go back to the 2.5.03? ___ cvsnt mailing list cvsnt@cvsnt.org http://www.cvsnt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cvsnt Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support: http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/
