Re: [avr-gcc-list] CVS or SVN ?!

[Dean Ferreyra]

Richard Urwin wrote:
> With CVS an engineer locks a file to work on it. You end up not being 
> able to work because you need to edit a locked file. Administrators can 
> break locks, but that leads to further problems later. As an engineer 
> you can find that the file you thought was safely locked has been 
> modified out from under you. SVN has no locks; they are unnecessary.
> 
> With CVS, any time two engineers have edited the same file one of them 
> has to painstakingly go through the file merging their changes into the 
> modified file by hand. With SVN that only happens if the engineers have 
> changed the same part of the same file, and that is rare.

CVS does not work like this by default.  I think the usual thing to do
is use CVS in "unreserved checkouts" mode where developers go ahead
and edit their own copies *without* locking, and periodically "commit"
their changes back to CVS.  Doing an "update" will automatically merge
in anyone's changes with your changes.  Only truly conflicting changes
get flagged, e.g., if you and another developer modified the same line
of code, and in those rare cases CVS is nice enough to present you
with both alternatives so you can merge the conflicts yourself.

I've been working for three or four years on a commercial project that
has about 20,000 files stored in CVS and about 25 developers, and CVS
has worked very well.

Dean