Thu, 15 Dec 2005
On version control systems.
I never thought anyone would still seriously advocate CVS over anything else these days, but I was wrong.
Bernhard:
- Ever heard of atomic commits? You modify three files, commit. Turns out that in the time between you starting to edit stuff and you committing, someone else changed some stuff, and your commit doesn't apply somehow. The first file is committed, the second breaks, and the third isn't committed. Congratulations, you just broke the build, and you'll have to manually fix it. When editing three files, that's manageable; when your commit is (say) about 15 files or so, it's not really as manageable anymore. CVS doesn't have atomic commits.
- About it being rock solid, I only say
Hah
. I've seen way too many cvs pserver bugs out there—and that's still the only possible way to go if you want anonymous CVS access. - How about the fact that upstream CVS development is rather extremely dead, after most of their developers started to develop subversion because the CVS code is so extremely horrible to maintain?
- Moving files around isn't just a nice thing to have; it's an extremely important feature. Far too often have I seen people afraid to reorganize their code because that would lose history on the files. If you can't move files, you can hardly ever reorganize code, which means that you let your version control system dictate how you should work—which is bad, very bad.
- And finally, being able to tell someone that
this is fixed in r132
rather than having to saythis is fixed in r1.74 of foo/bar, r1.34 of foo/baz, and r1.82 of foo/quux
is very helpful. Your suggestion about dates (there's normally at least a quarter of an hour between commits
) only suggests that you haven't seen many large projects in the heat of code changes. And even if that weren't true, the fact that itnormally
isn't a problem makes it even more of a problem on the occasions that it, in fact, does take less than a few seconds between my commit and yours
Really. Have you tried comparing CVS to anything else, on a serious project?
There should really be a way for all those version control systems to talk to eachother. After all, they all have one thing in common: they're all ways to exchange patches. Surely there must be some way to device a protocol or something so that those patches can be easily sent from one version control system to the other and back again?
Visual Studio 2005
Or: Why you should move away from Microsoft. Now
.
Visual Studio 2005, the new version of Microsoft's development tools, is coming out. Among its new features are Branching, Bug Tracking, and Atomic Checkins. Yes, that's right: Anno 2004, Microsoft still did not sell a version control system that had something as basic and important as branching. Kinda reminds me of the time when Microsoft implemented a telnet service for Windows right around the time when the UNIX world finally decided that telnet and RSH are insecure by design and that you should use SSH instead.
If Microsoft keeps lagging behind on such fundamental issues, you shouldn't be using them.
