[evs] Does EVS remove some of CVS limitations?

Eric B. ebenze at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 8 02:58:58 GMT 2008


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"Arthur Barrett" <arthur.barrett at march-hare.com> wrote in message 
news:fofqqk$3e8$1 at paris.nodomain.org...
>
>> 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.

Very Cool!  Thanks for pointing that out!  To be honest with you, only the 
default plugins are enabled.  Without being able to find documentation for 
the others, I have never really paid much attention to them.  Is there more 
documentation somewhere that better describes all the plugins that are 
shipped with CVSNT?


>> 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.

Actually, I found a few minutes today to look at the code a little more 
closely, and see what you mean.  I do see that it is expecting to find a bug 
number as an integer (even uses an atoi call), but it then gets converted 
back into a string (bugnumstr).  Am I missing something there?  Is there a 
reason somewhere else in the code that requires it to be a parsable int?

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

I realize that, which is why it is on my list of things to do.  But there is 
no way I can run EVS beta in a production site, so would have to be on the 
side playing around with it, and to fair, I'm not entirely sure how much 
useful feedback I'll be able to provide.  But will definitely give it a shot 
in the near future.


> 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.

I agree and understand entirely what you are saying.  Companies tend to 
gyrate toward Perforce or ClearCase because they are commercial products and 
"well polished".  Not to say that that isn't the case with CVS, but all FOSS 
projects tend to suffer the stigma of not being robust enough for a 
commercial environment.  This is not saying that I agree with that theory, 
but it is an unfortunate consequence of the Microsoft-effect.  With MS, the 
product released is the product that exists; you can't really customize it 
unless MS provided for that.  And no one is going to convince MS to update 
the product for their particular needs.

I love FOSS for precisely that reason; any product is configurable / 
customizable to your exact needs.  And if you don't have the technical 
expertise to handle the situation, then with a little sniffing around, you 
can find someone to do it for you.  That being said, I must admit that we 
too fall into the category of not harnassing our FOSS to the full extent of 
its potential.  CVS is a perfect example of that.  For example, integrating 
CVS with Jira has been on my list of things to do for the last couple of 
years; I just haven't found the time to finish up the project I started.

> 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.

I am not entirely convinced of your argument, but can definitely understand 
where you are coming from.  That being said, however, I guess as long as EVS 
has an easy to use API, then it should be easy to integrate it with whatever 
piece of software one choses to use.  Given that there is a big 
web-component end to EVS, does it support any form of webservices for 
communication between different applications?

Thanks,

Eric




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