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You make it sound like CVS kills children. People worked with CVS just fine for decades and OpenBSD has made their own tools for CVS to improve their developmen

by Crinus 7y ago

You make it sound like CVS kills children. People worked with CVS just fine for decades and OpenBSD has made their own tools for CVS to improve their development experience and, frankly, if a developer - regardless of age, lets not get into age discrimination here - finds CVS a roadblock to working on OpenBSD, they are simply not a good developer.

microcolonel 7y ago
> If a developer - regardless of age, lets not get into age discrimination here - finds CVS a roadblock to working on OpenBSD, they are simply not a good developer. While we're at it, if a developer finds ed (the standard text editor) a roadblock to working on OpenBSD, they are simply not a good developer. Why is somebody "not a good developer" if they don't want to work with tools which are an insult to the priorities and humanity of the user†, for no good reason, when they could go to Linux and have 99% of what's good about OpenBSD, without the cult of GCC 4.2-justifying, CVS masochists? I love OpenBSD, but the self-defeating goober decisions clearly reduce the number of people willing to become the experts needed to push the project forward. So much of OpenBSD is user-friendly, as long as that user reads the manual; but CVS is among the most user-hostile version control systems any living developer remembers using, and even if you know exactly what you're doing CVS is still an inconvenience because of centralization, and because of the amount of clerical work required to get it to operate properly. † In the context of a world full of spectacular alternatives; obviously this doesn't apply to a time when CVS was a cut above.
- Crinus 7y ago
  User friendliness is not binary but a spectrum and CVS is way above being "usable", even if it isn't the most user friendly VCS out there (hint: git isn't either). It certainly is not "insult to whatever of the user". As for ed, even though i realize you're not serious, screen oriented editors replaced ed as soon as Unix could use them and Unix developers at AT&T used ed mainly because they lacked the hardware to use anything else. It should be obvious that the difference between the user friendliness of a program that shows you a real time window of the text you are editing with immediate feedback and a command line interface based editor designed for slow teletypes is much greater than the difference between two slightly different sets of commands that will be the majority of one's VCS use will be.
  - rauhl 7y ago
    > It should be obvious that the difference between the user friendliness of a program that shows you a real time window of the text you are editing with immediate feedback and a command line interface based editor designed for slow teletypes is much greater than the difference between two slightly different sets of commands that will be the majority of one's VCS use will be. I think that anyone who is familiar with CVS & Git and with ed & vi/emacs will agree that there is a similar leap forward in capability. The move from CVS to SVN is a bit like the move from vi to emacs, but the move from CVS to Git really is like the move from ed to vi, vim or emacs. I suspect that this is probably another example of the Blub effect, this time applied to VCS: the CVS user looking up at Git thinks, ‘Why would I ever need that? Besides, if I ever did I’m sure that I could roll something that was good enough,’ while the Git user looking down on CVS thinks ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’
    - anjbe 7y ago
      You’re still missing what’s been stated elsewhere in the thread: that OpenBSD’s review process is VCS‐agnostic, that the project officially mirrors to GitHub, and that many developers and external contributors use the Git mirror for their work (just look on the tech@ list for how many mails have “diff --git” in the patch). Myself, I’m crazy about local branches and rebase -i. But it’s no skin off my back if the final command I run winds up being “cvs ci”.
    - Crinus 7y ago
      I think you'd be wrong here as personally i have used Git a lot more than CVS as i suspect would any developer nowadays who has at least a couple of years under their belt. And i think it is the exact opposite of what you are talking about that is happening: people already know Git and want to use it for everything - you see, after all, that the common response isn't something like "why would i use CVS again?", it is something like "why would i/some new developer learn CVS?", implying familiarity with Git and dislike towards learning a different tool.

by Crinus 7y ago

microcolonel 7y ago

> If a developer - regardless of age, lets not get into age discrimination here - finds CVS a roadblock to working on OpenBSD, they are simply not a good developer. While we're at it, if a developer finds ed (the standard text editor) a roadblock to working on OpenBSD, they are simply not a good developer. Why is somebody "not a good developer" if they don't want to work with tools which are an insult to the priorities and humanity of the user†, for no good reason, when they could go to Linux and have 99% of what's good about OpenBSD, without the cult of GCC 4.2-justifying, CVS masochists? I love OpenBSD, but the self-defeating goober decisions clearly reduce the number of people willing to become the experts needed to push the project forward. So much of OpenBSD is user-friendly, as long as that user reads the manual; but CVS is among the most user-hostile version control systems any living developer remembers using, and even if you know exactly what you're doing CVS is still an inconvenience because of centralization, and because of the amount of clerical work required to get it to operate properly. † In the context of a world full of spectacular alternatives; obviously this doesn't apply to a time when CVS was a cut above.

Crinus 7y ago
User friendliness is not binary but a spectrum and CVS is way above being "usable", even if it isn't the most user friendly VCS out there (hint: git isn't either). It certainly is not "insult to whatever of the user". As for ed, even though i realize you're not serious, screen oriented editors replaced ed as soon as Unix could use them and Unix developers at AT&T used ed mainly because they lacked the hardware to use anything else. It should be obvious that the difference between the user friendliness of a program that shows you a real time window of the text you are editing with immediate feedback and a command line interface based editor designed for slow teletypes is much greater than the difference between two slightly different sets of commands that will be the majority of one's VCS use will be.
- rauhl 7y ago
  > It should be obvious that the difference between the user friendliness of a program that shows you a real time window of the text you are editing with immediate feedback and a command line interface based editor designed for slow teletypes is much greater than the difference between two slightly different sets of commands that will be the majority of one's VCS use will be. I think that anyone who is familiar with CVS & Git and with ed & vi/emacs will agree that there is a similar leap forward in capability. The move from CVS to SVN is a bit like the move from vi to emacs, but the move from CVS to Git really is like the move from ed to vi, vim or emacs. I suspect that this is probably another example of the Blub effect, this time applied to VCS: the CVS user looking up at Git thinks, ‘Why would I ever need that? Besides, if I ever did I’m sure that I could roll something that was good enough,’ while the Git user looking down on CVS thinks ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’
  - anjbe 7y ago
    You’re still missing what’s been stated elsewhere in the thread: that OpenBSD’s review process is VCS‐agnostic, that the project officially mirrors to GitHub, and that many developers and external contributors use the Git mirror for their work (just look on the tech@ list for how many mails have “diff --git” in the patch). Myself, I’m crazy about local branches and rebase -i. But it’s no skin off my back if the final command I run winds up being “cvs ci”.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    I think you'd be wrong here as personally i have used Git a lot more than CVS as i suspect would any developer nowadays who has at least a couple of years under their belt. And i think it is the exact opposite of what you are talking about that is happening: people already know Git and want to use it for everything - you see, after all, that the common response isn't something like "why would i use CVS again?", it is something like "why would i/some new developer learn CVS?", implying familiarity with Git and dislike towards learning a different tool.