Re: CVS Update Behaviour

[Steve Greenland]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 02:14:21PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Friday, February 22, 2002 at 12:18:37 (-0600), Steve Greenland wrote: ]
> > On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 01:16:35AM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > > It's hardly even noticably
> > > more difficult to track the history across multiple files.  
> > 
> > Greg, *that* statement is complete and utter crap. Or, please post the
> > single *cvs* command that will display the full history (equivalent
> > of 'cvs log') of an entity *accross* renames/moves.
> 
> No, you're full of crap too if you think that's a necessary feature.

You've failed to read what I wrote. I didn't claim it was necessary.
I didn't claim it was common. I, in fact, wrote that I was generally
satisfied with CVS. What I *wrote* was *your* claime that tracking
history across renames was an effort that was "hardly even noticably
more difficult" was crap. Since I can read the history of a single file
(non-renamed) with one cvs command, I wanted to know how to do it when
the file (entity, if you prefer) *had* been renamed, or moved to another
directory. Reading the change log of the current file to (hopefully)
find the comment about what the name of the file *used* to be and then
reading its changelog, etc. etc. is *not* hardly more difficult. The
only place the rename info is stored is in the changelog, and if the
person who made the change didn't get the right comment in there, it's
lost. Should the comment be there? Of course. But people make mistakes.

If being able to deal transparently with file renames and moves is
important to one, then CVS is not the proper tool. 

> If you're so damn worried about making it one simple command for your
> loser users then write damn wrapper and shut up.

My users are not losers. I'm not even particulary worried about it. When
we need to do it, we know how.

> I've never heard so much BS about this subject, even after all these
> years of discussion about it, and yet I think I'm the only one to have
> actually done something about it _and_ shared my efforts!
> 
> I've posted the basic starter wrapper I wrote to do this several times.
> In fact I wrote the damn wrapper separately each time. 

That's actually kind of sad. Why don't you put the script(s) in the
contrib directory, and point people at it when the topic comes up,
rather than expending the effort arguing and re-writing the script?

Hmmm, searching in groups.google.com, the only thing I could find

is 
        cp $1 $2
        cvs rm -f $1
        cvs add $2
        cvs commit -m "moved $1 to $2" $1 $2

from January 2000. If that's the script you rewrite every time, well,
yeah, that's easy. I was hoping that you meant you'd written scripts
for logging, and/or diffing and merging a branch when files have been
moved/renamed. If you have, they should go in contrib. If not, the fact
that no one has done them and posted them might, just might, indicate
that they aren't as trivial as you claim.

In the meantime, I'll go on using CVS because it does the things I need
it to do. But there are some things it doesn't do well, and if one or
more of them is important to a particular user, then the only honest,
fair thing to do is steer them away from CVS.

Steve

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