Re: forcing an rcs initial checkin

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 18:27, Charles Menzes wrote:
> 
> 	honestly speaking, i've never really dug too deeply in the 
> 	differences between rcs and cvs. before i went to work for 
> 	my current employer, i had never used either, so rcs seemed
> 	like a pretty good idea. the systems group are some serious
> 	perl-folk and write a nice little wrapper for vi that will
> 	let users call vi and it will automagically checkout the file
> 	you're working on and check it back into rcs after you're 
> 	through with it. so, for editing router configs and such, it
> 	suits its purpose. i'm never in springfield for a lug meeting,
> 	but maybe rcs/cvs is a decent topic for a meeting, or maybe
> 	a springfield.pm meeting.

The executive summary: CVS works with whole projects, while RCS works
with individual files.  CVS doesn't lock files; instead, you just grab
the whole project, make your changes to your working copy, and check
them all in at once.  If someone else changes the same file you do, CVS
compares the two files and merges your changes together; if that isn't
totally possible, it flags the merge as incomplete and lets you manually
reconcile them.  It sounds dangerous, but in practice it works rather
well.

The version control field is very interesting right now.  CVS has some
problems in its design, and there are several projects right now that
aim to replace CVS.  All of them fix the perceived weaknesses of CVS;
each has very interesting extra features or design goals.  The
highlights:

 - BitKeeper is proprietary (but free of charge for open source use),
and supposedly incorporates some new ideas.  This is noteworthy because
the Linux kernel is now managed with it.

 - arch is built using a Unix software tools philosophy; there is no
server, and everything is done with standard Unix text processing
tools.  It's rather lightweight, and takes branching to an extreme; all
working copies can be used as master repositories as well, and multiple
master repositories can fork and merge like branches in CVS can.  It's
extremely distributed.

 - Subversion uses Apache 2.0 and WebDAV/DeltaV as its server, and is
very extensible.  Much of what BitKeeper does is also done in
Subversion, and the Subversion people are thinking of doing a
"BitKeeper-alike" for their version 2.0.  Its use of WebDAV means that
you can do a lot of cool things with it, like attach to a Subversion
repository via Windows Web Folders.

So yes, there's a lot of cool stuff going on with version control.  I'd
do a meeting on it if I could get there from Indy. :-(


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