Re: git versus CVS (versus bk)

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 31, 2005, 10:24 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0510311111340.2916@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0510301811390.27915@g5.osdl.org>

Hi,

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> It's really not very easy to explain why CVS sucks. After all, sometimes 
> people who have used it for decades have a hard time understanding the 
> suckiness.
>
> [...]

How about adding the whole explanation as

	git/Documentation/howto/tell-why-cvs-sucks.txt

(maybe with some more polite name)?

Also, I´d like to add that CVS branching/merging is no good:

<tryingtoputonalbertsshoes>

Sometimes a developer gets an idea, or the need, to implement a certain feature to a piece of free software. Now, this idea might seem good, but it might take a while to

	- implement it,
	- flesh the bugs out, and
	- maybe realize the idea was not all that good.

All the while, the project is prospering, and you have to keep up-to-date. With CVS, you would do "cvs update" every once in a while, and clean up the merge conflicts. In effect, you would track the history of the upstream project.

Often, however, you would like to track *your* changes, too. This is not possible in CVS. You just can´t track two different histories in the same working directory.

Now, if you are working on two or more different ideas, which you want to test separately *and* together, you need to merge your local branches every once in a while. If it weren´t for "every once in a while", but "once", you still could do it in CVS. If you want to merge several times (keeping the separate development branches), you can´t.

</tryingtoputonalbertsshoesfailingmiserably>

Ciao, Dscho