[cvsnt] Betr.: CVSNT to CVS

[Tony Hoyle]

Bryce Schober wrote:
> 
> This last point can't be stressed enough, in my experience. For whatever
> reason, CVSNT never got the widespreadd acceptance in the software
> development community that other SCMs have. 

I disagree.  The download figures disagree with you too.  CVSNT was as 
mainstream as it gets.. it was never a Firefox or Redhat, but millions 
of people use it every day.

Of course, from a commercial point of view acceptance means nothing 
unless it generates revenue.  It's been said repeatedly that if 1% of 
people who used CVSNT bought 1 copy of Suite we could employ a number of 
developers full time.  If that model won't work then we're content to 
ship to 1% of the number of users and guarantee paying my salary every 
month.  That's a sad thing for someone like me, who loves opensource, to 
be saying.  Yes, I have considered removing opensource support and just 
leaving commercial.  I haven't though.. because I still think opensource 
is important, and so does Arthur.

You think mainstream is important..  It really isn't.  cvsnt was never 
conceived as such.. it happened by accident.  Maybe evs will, maybe not. 
  evs however is under a very different model to cvsnt.. it's 
fundamentally commercial although (most of) the source code is freely 
available.

> And so, when you do finally get to that point where the newer features make
> a solid business case in your scenario, you'll be stuck without an easy
> upgrade path.
>
The point of EVS is you don't *need* an upgrade path.  We just update 
evs to support the new clients as required.  The work seamlessly and 
there's no work to do and no upgrade cost.

Version control really doesn't change - at its core all systems are 
basically alike.  Even the distributed systems aren't fundamentally 
different (and a git interface to evs has been mooted already).

What we've ended up is a multitude of new mutually incompatible systems 
written all to answer a single need of one developer, but all copying 
each other.  I've long since realized that's a stupid way for the 
industry to continue.

EVS is me going "Screw it, I'm not playing any more" and writing a 
system that can talk to anything, given enough time and coffee.  From 
the outset we handle migration from different systems, and because we 
can pretend to be different types of server, migration out again isn't 
hard either, should it be needed.

Crucially EVS is *not* a new version control system.  It will be 
whatever you want it to be.  It can be CVSNT, or SVN, or TFS or 
(potentially) Git.  Or all of them at once, if you want.  There is no 
'EVS Protocol' and there never will be.

So you can upgrade to 'Version Control system of the week' and have 
*exactly* the same problems a couple of years down the line, or you can
use something that's going to grow with you.   And if it doesn't... 
there will be lots of ways to migrate - because nobody has to support 
evs specifically.. it handles the support itself.

Tony