[drupal-devel] Retaining CVS history over moves (was: PHPTemplatehits core)

[Chris Johnson]

Tom Dobes wrote:
> On 5/4/05, Gordon Heydon <gordon at heydon.com.au> wrote:
> 
>>If you read the cvs manual you will see that you actually have to manually
>>move files in the archive itself. The is done outside of the cvs interface.
>>So it is a real pain.
> 
> 
> 
> That's what I thought too... but Chris' message made it seem like it
> could be done from a client (without manually manipulating the
> repository).  Oh, well... I guess that was just wishful thinking. 
> Thanks for the clarification and sorry for the noise.


I guess "real pain" is relative.  I assume that the CVS maintainers of Drupal 
have shell access to the CVS host.  As a long-time user of Unix, I don't find 
moving files outside the CVS interface to be a "real pain."  In fact, in some 
ways it's easier, because the Unix filesystem commands to me are "good old 
friends" I've been using for years, and the CVS commands are cryptic with lots 
of odd option flags (I do CVS from the command line; no GUI for me).

Surely one would not want to do daily CVS manipulations through the 
filesystem.  But for a once in a year restructuring of core like was just done 
with xtemplate/phptemplate, it seems like a reasonable thing to do.  But 
that's just me.  I'm completely comfortable with the Unix shell command line, 
and I've been using CVS for a few years, and RCS before that for many years.


It is one of CVS's shortcomings, but no version control application is perfect.

FWIW,
--
Chris Johnson