Re: BRANCH LABEL FOR DIRECTORIES

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, June 18, 2001 at 15:18:16 (-0400), Noel L Yap wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: BRANCH LABEL FOR DIRECTORIES
>
> So why not have CVS do this work OOTB?

You could.  It's been proposed several times before.  Nobody's stepped
up to write the code.  Even though I've also proposed it in the past, my
proposal was in response to someone else's problem and of late I've not
even had time to implement the solutions to my own problems, let alone
anyone else's!  ;-)

It should be quite trivial to add such rename functionality to any of
the more advanced font-ends to CVS (be they either stand alone clients,
or wrappers that just call the existing command-line client).  Even the
handling of the manual parts of merging renamed/moved files could be
done in the client and/or front-end.  There's not even any need to do
anything fancy -- just search back for magic rename comments in files
that had no changes merged and if they are the result of a rename then
go look (recursively) for the ancestor revision in the old file(s) and
"manually" do the merge on the client side.  Nothing at all needs to be
changed in the repository structure to support such functionality.

If people really want it then _they_ should build it!  CVS is user
supported software!

> How 'bout:  Your company decides to change its name or goes through a merger 
> and
> you're programming in Java?

I'd say that people using CVS for Java (at least with traditional java
development environments) are already on the verge of being in the land
of the truly unsupported anyway.....

> In any case, /why/ would it matter why anyone would do this?  The fact is that
> it's a request commonly made.  Your answer seems to be to deem that request as
> being "wrong".

People make stupid and idiotic requests of all kinds of things all the
time.  Only marketing departments ever seem to see any need to satisfy
them.  There's nothing "wrong" with telling someone that their request
is "wrong"/inappropriate/out-of-place if that's the case.

I thought most of us in the software world were supposed to be more in
tune with doing careful requirements analysis and such.

> In the end, every product is market-driven -- if there's no need for CVS, it
> wouldn't exist.

Sorry, I should have qualified that as "mass-market" (though I did
qualify CVS as "niche market").

> I think Greg has been saying that CVS is a niche product and that it shouldn't
> braoden it's horizons.  So, if:
> 1. You have binary files,
> 2. You _ever_ need to rename files for the lifetime of your project,
> 3. You want to version directories,
> 4. You want to reuse a filename that's been rm'd in the past but with a
> different type,
> 5. Possibly others I can't think of right now,
> 
> then don't use CVS.

Well, not exactly 100% on all those points, but within reason.

In this forum 99.999% of the FAQs that have no existing answer in
context are from people who should not be using CVS in the first place
(or who can't find anything better and are then uwilling to figure out
how to use CVS properly).

In fact there's obviously a very strong demand for something to fill the
niche that CVS fits well into....  The only problem is that at least
half the people in the world who are not in that niche seem to think
that they should be able to use CVS for whatever hair-brained idea
they've got too.

If someone wants a tool with broader horizons than CVS then they should
build it (and call it something else, of course ;-).  If it eventually
replaces CVS entirely then that's OK.  If it doesn't then those in the
niche where CVS fits will still have an appropriate tool to use to meet
their needs.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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