[evs] Does EVS remove some of CVS limitations?

Arthur Barrett arthur.barrett at march-hare.com
Thu Feb 7 20:48:21 GMT 2008


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Eric,


> I'm not quite sure I understand.  Can you please explain what you mean but 
> "audit"?

http://www.march-hare.com/cvsnt/features/audit/en.asp


If you are not using auditing yet I strongly suggest you turn it on - it's 
very valuable.

> > If all your bugs start with PROJ then you could just use
> PROJ as the
> > synonym for bug.
>
> Unfortunately not - each project has a unique prefix that identifies it. 
> So, for instance, we have different prefixes such as CAP, TAB, FKM, EPP, 
> etc..  so each individual project would have issues CAP-1, TAB-1, FKM-1, 
> etc...

If someone paid for us to support such a system of course we'd code for it, 
or the company that wants if could do it themselves.

> time it might take me to build it), but would you consider making the RE a 
> configuration value such that a user/site can customize it for their 
> needs?

No.  The RE is made up of several "sub-RE's" and the code needs to know 
which part is which in order to find the bug number, so if the user changed 
the RE considerably then the server would crash.  Once again - if a company 
needs such support they can either pay to have their own team modify the 
code or they can pay us to modify the code.

> Unfortunately, I haven't had the time yet, although it is on my list of 
> thigns to do.

We need people testing.

> However, I can pretty much assume that you will have a lot of trouble 
> convincing ppl to dump their current bug tracking software and move to EVS 
> for issue tracking.

The majority of companies do not use issue tracking (even if they have a 
system in place) so I don't see that as an issue.  The EVS bug tracker uses 
the same data model as Bugzilla so if the customer needs more features then 
they can install the full-bugzilla to get them.

I know there is a lot of talk about SVN and Git and Mercurial, and Bugzilla 
and Jira etc - but I really couldn't care less about them.  What I have seen 
time and time again is developers who claim that management have no money to 
spend and they are perfectly happy with CVSNT/Jira/CVS/whatever and 
migrating to something else is just out of the question, then a day or a 
week later management have approved hundreds of thousands of dollars (or 
more often millions of dollars) to simply bin it and replace it with 
Continuus or ClearCase or another proprietary system.  Now I personally 
think that often this is a good thing, but a 'better thing' would be to 
achieve the same results with the tools you already have (yes it's possible) 
by paying for support from the people who wrote it.  Unfortunately the 
'powers that be' assume that CVS is only capable of what they can see it 
doing - everyone thinks just because they've ran the CVS installer and can 
commit and checkout they are a CVS/SCM expert - nothing could be further 
from the truth.

The one thing I am 100% convinced of is that developers have no appreciation 
for how much management will pay for (and how much they are willing to 
change current practices) in order to get decent reporting and control. 
Software professionals working in commercial software development only have 
two choices: they can swtich to EVS from CVS/CVSNT/SVN etc or management 
will force them to start using ClearCase.

Regards,



Arthur




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