[cvsnt] CVSNT implementation reliable?

[patrick goovaerts]

Currently i'm investigating the use of CVSNT for our IT/dept.  Our IT/Dept 
includes 5 developers which are integrated in a seperate company, acting as 
a 'Back-Office' for the 7 companies in our Group.  The develpers have no 
specific role (java-programmer, web-developer, graphical designer,...). 
They have there own projects to work with and these projects can be 
RPGIV-Java-Web-...based. (no version control needed!)  When a developer is 
not at the office, other developers must have access to his projects to make 
some changes when needed.  Finally, they all will work with IBM 
RAD-developer suite (WDSCi 6.x)

1) Workspaces (Eclipse)
- Local Access
Each user will have it's own workspace on his Dev-PC.  When developers work 
on their local workspace only, this creates the problem of 
project-availability for other developers.

- NetworkFolders
Therefore I tried to store projects on a network-drive and let the developer 
point to this network-workspace.  This works for some projects but not for 
all (web-projects and webfaced projects are too big to work properly).

- Local Access with NetworkFolders
Another option is to ask the developer to copy the workspace from the 
network-folder to his own dev-pc first.  Work on the project and restore to 
the networkfolder.

==> Because the network-drive is in our Backup-process, we don't have to 
worry much for loss of projects.  The full workspaces are backed-up and can 
be restored 'as-is'.  But, this also means that every project needs to be 
stored as a full workspace (loss of default workspace preferences). This 
overload on workspaces will become 'unreadable' over time (to give an idea, 
we have about 500 applications running for the moment)

2) CVS
It looks like CVS can help us here.  Because all projects are stored on a 
reserved server, they can be retrieved easily when needed be each developer 
at any time.  After working on a project, he can choose to create a new 
version or not, however this is not a key-issue.  All projects are created 
for inside companies only and they all work with the same project versions.


3) Backup/Restore issues
CVS-Backup is covered by our TSM-backup-procedures, so we don't have to 
worry about that either.  However, i noticed that the sources are changed by 
CVS and have a changed name (source.java,v).  In fact, the source is saved 
in it's original state and changes are written at the end of the file... 
So, what happens in case of server-failure?  Or when we need to upgrade the 
CVSNT-version?  Are all the sources available again after rebuilding the 
server and restoring the data-folders (which contains the CVS-folders)?  In 
a non-CVS situation, we don't have to worry about the sources because they 
are not changed.  A simple restore of data and we have the 'clean' java/data 
sources again.

any comments are welcome...