Re: File sharing

[Thomas S. Urban]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 13:01:09 -0700, Ben Baker sent 3.0K bytes:
> We're in the process of converting from another source control system
> to CVS and one of the things our previous system did that CVS does not
> is file sharing.  I was just curious if anyone has a solution to this.
> I've thought of a couple of things, but don't want to do too much
> investigation if it's something that definitely won't work.  The ideas
> I had were:
> 
> 1.  Develop a system of watches on certain files so that whenever a
> change is comitted it is automatically comitted to the other shared
> locations.

#1 is going to lead to many problems, for example, what happens when the
two locations are changed independently?

> 2.  Use symbolic links on our CVS server (a UNIX box)

I think that there are also problems with symbolic links in the
repository.

You forgot 3: Don't do repository sharing.

We imported tons of shared stuff from a Source Safe repository to CVS.
The way we handled shares was to eliminate them.  This involved some
factoring of code, creating of libraries, some creative definitions of
cvs modules (sort of sharing on the client side), and in general
improving how our development process worked.  In most cases, sharing in
VSS wasn't done for really good reason.  Improvements to our build
system eliminated 95% of the need for shares.

If you really need sharing in the repository, CVS might not be the
answer.  There was a thread on this list in the not too distant past
that dealt with symbolic links in the repository.  You might search for
it to get more info on that idea.  I haven't seen anyone discuss
building an automated merging system on top of the CVS back end,
probably because it's a pretty bad idea. ;)

HTH
Scott

-- 
You have many friends and very few living enemies.