Re: Kernel SCM: When does CVS fall down where it REALLY matters?

Val Henson
2002-03-09T01:53:20Z

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 05:38:27PM -0700, Erik Andersen wrote:
>
> 6) Ability to do sane archival and renaming of directories.
> CVS doesn't even know what a directory is.

How about sane renaming of plain old files?

For a laugh, read the instructions on how to "rename" CVS files.
Hint: "Rename" is not the correct word.

$ mv old new
$ cvs remove old
$ cvs add new
$ cvs commit -m "Renamed old to new" old new

Gee, that looks like adding a new file to me. Upon reading further,
that is exactly what this "rename" operation is doing. There are two
other ways to rename a file in CVS, one of which is described as
"dangerous" and the other as having "drawbacks." References:

http://www.gnu.org/manual/cvs-1.9/html_node/cvs_66.html

Note that the way to rename a file in in BitKeeper is:

$ bk mv old new

No danger, no drawbacks, no hand editing of history files.

I strongly recommend that anyone attempting to make CVS a viable
replacement for BitKeeper start out by actually using BitKeeper.
You're so used to being crippled by CVS that you don't even know what
you're missing.

-VAL