That's a great idea. It'd be fairly straightforward to make a simple drupal-specific frontend to CVS that cover the common-use cases. It'd even make coders lives easier as in my case, whenever I want to update my module I still have to look-up the documentation as I use other RCS systems then CVS. Kyle On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 10:11 AM, Wim Leers <work@wimleers.com> wrote:
On Feb 22, 2008, at 14:27 , Karoly Negyesi wrote:
However great git is, given the huge number of our contributors using Windows and on various levels of knowledge about RCS systems, anything without a proper Windows port and a Tortoise-alike interface has no chance. To my knowledge, current this means Mercurial: 2007-12-02: First public release (0.0.1) of TortoiseHg with binary installer. Since then there were three more releases -- quite an active project. There is a http://repo.or.cz/w/git-cheetah.git/ which says "This is an explorer extension in its infancy. Do not expect anything to work, unless you are fixing it." -- unless this becomes useable, git is out of question.
...
Do we want to change? I presume that the project-VCS API integration happens eventually so drupal.org is ready (this is quite a stretch). Well, after many years I am not so sure. Are the niceties of SVN over CVS are enough to make such a big change? What this buys us? Will the hard concepts of branching and tagging become easier for our contrib authors? I doubt.
At first, I found using CVS a hurdle. I managed, but I had to look up several of the commands every time. Until I discovered the usage of .bash_profile. Now I absolutely don't mind using CVS, since all ugly things are abstracted away (although several of these commands are Drupal-specific, but that doesn't matter to me, as I use SVN everywhere else).
My point is: the biggest problem people have with CVS, is the usability aspect (actually the concepts, but it's usability improvements that should make the core concepts obvious). However, that can be overcome by using your shell effectively – any coder should know how to use a RCS and the shell. But that doesn't solve the other problem: themers generally don't know how to use a RCS in the first place. Changing to a different RCS won't fix any of these problems, at least not to the level where we need it.
So I think a good candidate "solution" ("improvement" would be more accurate), would be to code our own CVS front-end, tied specifically to Drupal purposes. If written in C++/Qt, it would be possible to provide a cross-platform interface. Cross-platform is important to us: we want to support both Windows and Mac OS X (and perhaps more). This would probably be used by many coders too, not just themers. Does anybody think this is a good idea? Or perhaps it could not work? If so, for which reasons?
So I fully agree with you, Karoly, changing the RCS won't fix any of the *real* issues we're currently having :)
Wim Leers ~ http://wimleers.com/work
-- Research Assistant eBusiness Center @ BYU kyle.mathews2000.com/blog