[development] SVN vs. CVS? (was re: CVS branch work best practices?)

[Adrian Simmons]

Derek Wright wrote:
> ways SVN improved things that CVS sucks at (basically, renaming files),
And directories. Unversioned directories have always been a real bugbear of 
CVS for me.

> SVN still fails to make merging branches easy.  sure, the syntax of the 
> command changed from:
> 
> "cvs update -j [revision_1] -j [revision_2]"
> 
> to:
> 
> "svn merge -r [revision_1] -r [revision_2]"
or imagine:

svk smerge /path/to/branch /path/to/other/branch
svk push

Seriously, an SVN repo comibined with SVK used by developers locally would 
be a big improvement over plain cvs. At least for contrib, CVS works ok for 
Drupal core.

> and no 
> one is complaining about wasted time while "cvs tag" runs,
Well, we had that debate, made those complaints and the idea of changing was 
shot down - there's no point complaining about something that won't change, 
that's a waste of even more time. The change from CVS is/was not going to 
happen, end of story.

> bottom line: nearly all of the confusion is being caused because of 
> misunderstanding
I think there is also a lot of frustration, in effect we had it easy before.
Develop in HEAD, branch for each new drupal version, apply fixes in the 
released branch directly etc. Fairly simple, in fact you could often *avoid* 
having to merge at all, it was possible to ignore some of CVS less usable 
commands. The new system in effect forces us to do more work - and pretty 
much makes it essential to get to grips with cvs merge.

It's all for the better, but you'll never get people to like doing more work :)

And that's without getting into the extra work you have to spend as a user 
now tracking module updates if you're used to pulling them from cvs.

> offset the very high cost of switching
And there's the rub. And that's also the problem with 'eating your own 
dogfood' vs using an off the shelf system. Then again switching systems is 
always going to be painful.

I don't have any easy answers, and I don't want to knock the great work 
you've already done Derek - but you're making us all work harder, just get 
some ear plugs till the anguished screams and swearing die down =D

You know we'll all get used to it eventually.

-- 
Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com>
e-mail <mailto:adrinux at perlucida.com>