Re: CVS, Linus, and us

Warner Losh (imp@village.org)
Mon, 19 Feb 1996 15:23:08 -0700


: Basically mounting the holy CVS tree over NFS read-only should solve
: all the write problems. I think BSD people are just getting a current
: "export" instead of a "real checkout". Having an "export" is enough
: to have the latest sources, but you need to import them before you
: can change them via CVS.

No. The NetBSD people maybe, but the FreeBSD people give you the
entire tree, comments and all, to grab by sup. OpenBSD gives you a
machine that you can access via anonymous CVS.

To the person who suggested importing, over and over, the sources and
you'd have the tree: That is false. You would have snapshots of a
tree, without any of the comentary that usually goes with tree. If
someone changes
outp(0x56, 0x60);
to
outp(0x76, 0x60);
all you know is that the change has happened. With a good source code
control system, you would know why. That is what makes the CVS trees
from FreeBSD, at least, so valuable. People tend to document why they
made the changes, so you'd know that the MUMBLEFOO bit was added to
the initialization sequence to help BRAIN-DEAD-MONKEY keyboards
operate properly....

Warner