[cvsnt] Re: Best practices for shadow sandbox

[Bo Berglund]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:39:27 -0500, "John J. Xenakis"
<mhare at jxenakis.com> wrote:

>It's important to find a way to get CVSNT to work as well in this
>regard as SourceSafe, but it's sure hard to find information.
>> > - User Interface

Please consider thta CVSNT is a *server* and as such has no user
interface whatsoever. The client part of CVSNT is a command line
utility and must be run with the proper arguments.

What you use if you are not comfortable with this is a graphic front
end to the command line client cvs, WinCvs or Tortoise.

But any usability and GUI features etc that you miss or have not found
should be discussed on the respective forums for these products. This
list is for the server and the command line client.

>> > - Exclusive edit locks
>> > 
>> > I want the restriction that only one person at a time can edit any
>> > given file to be strictly enforced (even for text files).  [...]

You can always set up the CVSNT server to require "reserved edits",
which for all normal purposes amount to the same thing as the
exclusive locks which are not supported by CVSNT.
If I remember correctly you put something into the cvswrappers file on
the server and it applies to all files if you like.


>There's one more serious usability problem that perhaps you could
>comment on -- the "client view" rather than the "server view."
>
>This seems like a relatively small thing, but it appears to have
>major consequences.
>
>In Microsoft Visual SourceSafe you can browse the entire directory
>structure on the server.  Once you've set up your working directory
>(sandbox directory), you can selectively "get" or "checkout" one, two
>three files, or an entire sub-directory, or the entire project.
>
>But on CVSNT you can't do any of that stuff, as far as I can tell.

Wrong, the cvs ls commands opens up a repository browsing function
that is used by WinCvs in order to *browse* the repository.
Has been there several years by now....

>A new person who's going to be working on one single file can't even
>get started without getting the entire project onto his hard disk.

Also wrong! You can check out whole modules, submodules or single
files with CVS, there is no block anywhere for that!
Why do you think there is????
 
>Am I missing something here?

Definitely! I think you should be an experienced user yourself before
you start doing consultancy work on a product like this.
Did you ever try it out yourself in serious work???

>installation faces.  Is there a way for someone getting started on an
>existing project to be more flexible than checking out the entire
>module?  Is there a way to use the "shadow sandbox" as part of a
>solution?

Again, what are you referring to when you repeat "shadow". To me it
sounds very strange. Are you perhaps referring to people working with
a website and having their provate files checked out locally and then
you want to have every commit reflect onto a test server for that
website?
If that is the case, then *yes* it can be done very easily with CVSNT.
You use the postcommand scriptfile to issue a cvs update on a checked
out working copy served by the test server and that's it.


/Bo
(Bo Berglund, developer in Sweden)