[cvsnt] Some beginner questions about cvsnt

[Rogier Eijkelhof]

Hi,

I have been working with existing cvsnt repositories for quite a while now 
(as a client that is, using TortoiseCvs) and I need to set up a new 
repository now. To my surprise there seems to be some functionality missing 
that seems vital to me when dealing with sourcecode databases, but I hope 
that's just due to my lack of experience with the admin side of cvsnt :)

The main thing that confuses me, is that cvsnt seems to be very 
system-related, in the sense that cvs user and repository names are related 
in some way to actual users and paths on the particular system where the 
cvs repository is hosted. I don't get this, what do these two have to do 
with eachother? Suppose I want to move the repository to another machine, 
wouldn't it be more logically if I can just copy the database, launch the 
cvsnt server app, tell the users to use a new address and that's it?

Why do cvs users need to be related to system users, it seems to make much 
more sense to me if a list of users (plus their access rights) would be 
specified within the cvs database. The particular system it's running on 
should be totally transparent.

Same for the repository names, as I experienced so far the users (clients) 
really have to specify the physical path on the server where the repository 
is hosted. What good is that, wouldn't it be easier & more flexible if you 
could just specify in cvsnt: I have repositories in these directories (1) 
publicly available as these names (2). Then users would only deal with 
"clean names" (2), allowing the admin to move the repositories to different 
dirs (1) on the server without further implications.

As far as user access rights are concerned, I have been using Source 
OffSite a long time ago and besides it's vast lack of essential features 
(OS other than windows, internet access, etc) I really liked its ability to 
config each user's access rights. You could specify per user what files & 
dirs he could read+write, just read, or not see at all. Is this also 
possible with cvsnt, or do I have to mess around with win2000 user rights 
to simulate this?

Sorry for all the questions :) Hope someone with more insight in the 
philosophy behind cvs can enlighten me about these issues.

Thanks, Rogier.