[cvsnt] Re: compatibility cvsnt w/ cvs 1.11.x (cyclic)

[Tony Hoyle]

Rick Silton wrote:

> I'm hoping to use CVSNT (will be running on Linux if that matters) but I
> noticed some comments on the wiki documentation that have me concerned. 
> In particular, I need to be able to build my repository from a lot of
> existing
> RCS files.  I have, and was planning on using the rcs-to-cvs.sh script
> (contributed by Per Cederqvist ,David MacKenzie, Brian Berliner, et.al.)
> but I saw, in http://www.cvsnt.org/wiki/ViewCvs, the following comment
> that makes me think this won't work:

The 2.0.x RCS file format is identical to the CVS 1.11 one, so it's
bidirectionally compatible (as long as you don't use any CVSNT features
like Unicode).  It isn't the same as RCS 5.7, but then neither is CVS
1.11...  ViewCVS has problems because it uses RCS to access the CVS files,
which just happens to work a lot of the time, but not 100% of the time.
 
> Lastly, I have a fairly large number of users that will be running their
> clients on linux (either command line or cervisia), and I cannot ensure
> that they will upgrade to CVSNT (even though I intend to give them a RPM
> install).  Obviously they won't be able to take advantage of the new
> capabilities, but are there other issues that I should be aware of?  It
> appears the basic commands (co, update, commit, etc) work, but given the

>From the client point of view the server is identical (at least if the
clients are standard CVS clients...  3rd party ones sometimes glitch, but
standard stuff is pretty much guaranteed to work).

>>"The repository format is compatible going back to CVSNT 1.3. But see
> [CvsChapter102 11.6.5 Using >watches with old versions of CVS], if you
> [have

CVS 1.3 was about 6 years ago...  there isn't a CVSNT version below 1.11
(the quoted text is verbatim from the old CVS manual).

Tony

Tony