Re: SCMS question

"Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> [much snipped]
>> Why are so few people committers?
>> ...
>> The answer to both questions is because CVS limitations make it hard to do
>> better.
>
> Uh, no. The reason there are so few committers is that there are so few
> people qualified not to break things.

Not to break the codebase? Or not to break the archive? It's only due to CVS's
awkwardness that the latter is a concern at all.

> If we had a community with hundreds of people with commit access, very
> possibly we'd be feeling the need of a better SCM system. But right
> now, CVS is not the bottleneck, and I don't see that we'd get a payback
> for the pain of changing to something else.

I'm not suggesting changing the number of people who can commit code to HEAD.
But getting work into the revision control system sooner, before it's ready to
be merged into HEAD. Right now we're giving up most of the advantages revision
control systems exist for. We're using CVS as a glorified archival system.

You're still merging patches and reviewing patches by hand, without any of the
tools to, for example, view incremental changes in the branch, view the logs
of the branch, merge the branch into the code automatically taking into
account the known common ancestor. Instead of receiving a 20k patch without
any tools to work with it you would be given a branch name and be able to view
and merge it into the main branch using the tools.

Moreover work on things like bitmapped indexes that other people want to help
on is hampered by this need to be mailing around patches. If two or three
people submit changes (based possibly on different old versions of the patch)
the main developer has to merge them into his version of the patch by hand and
mail out a new patch. The whole point of a revision control system is to
provide tools to make that easier.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com