[cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages

[Luigi D. Sandon]

I didn't followed this thread any longer, but given that a friend of mine 
pointed it to me yesterday and I am explicity called in...

> D. Baushke (one of the original CVS developers from 20 odd years ago) 
> pointed out recently on the gnu.cvs.help newsgroup that in his opinion CVS 
> should ALWAYS be built from source by the person installing it.  If you 
> are

Ah, good, that settles all :). Wasn't CVSNT born because the CVS guys didn't 
bother to add any feature the four of them didn't need, and thereby the 
whole Universe shouldn't need? That just shows how gnu people are just *nix 
talibans without a clue about "the other OS", which unluckily runs on a lot 
of PCs , most Windows users simply does not have all the tools they need to 
build from source, and many Windows developer are not Visual C developers 
and do not have an environment to build form source. GNU guys are perfectly 
happy if their software doesn't run on the Evil OS, but people selling 
sofware may have a different viewpoint about their customer base.

Windows sysadmins are not used to build software from sources - and I will 
fire any sysadmin that would install *development tools* on a production 
server. Anyway it explains why some developers abandoned the project and 
went on to write Subversion - noone of them AFAIK believe "true open source 
software should be build from pure sources on a pure OS never touched by 
Bill Gates".

> The advertising message has been carefully designed so that the majority 
> of the people who will be annoyed by it are those who we hoped to annoy: 
> those

I am not against that message appearing on screen. It shouldn not have been 
written in the log, suddendly, almost without notice.

> to spend on 'non-core' tools (such as GUIs) when these tools are 
> irrelevant without the Verstion Control engine.  E.g.: if Luigi D. Sandon 
> now chooses to switch the versioning engine to Subversion then those 
> client tools are irrelevant.

Those client tools are not irrelevant at all. That's your basic flaw that 
could undermine your whole business model. Without them, believe me, a 
command-line-only cvs would have very few users under Windows. Most Windows 
developers are not used to command line tools, most developers were used to 
SourceSafe or other version control system that have a GUI. Switching them 
to CVS would have been very difficult, required a lot of training - and a 
lot of mistakes needing to be fixed.

Without WinCVS, Tortoise and WinMerge - all tools that you too offer with 
your suite, I guess CVSNT wouldn't have gone far. And because most tools 
started to support more than one backend (i.e. Eclipse, CrossVC, and many 
others) or, like Tortoise, came in different flavours, they make the engine 
"irrelevant", perhaps.

Given my budget constraint unluckily I am forced to choose to buy what 
improves my team work, and a simpler interaction with the VC engine means 
faster work and less errors. That's what drives me when buying tools - if I 
don't see much added value but to get rid of a nag message in buying 
software, well, I look elsewhere.  - no one of us is paid to "support open 
source projects",  sorry.

I tried to share my little knowledge of CVSNT here to help the project - I 
am not a C developer thereby I can't help improving the code-, until we have 
a budget that would allow us to do more, but if that's no longer welcome I 
can find something better to do in my spare time. I contributed and 
contribute to other open source project, but of course it doesn't matter...

> Free Open Source CVSNT every year can afford to pay a little towards its

Unluckily, you don't accept donations like many other open source projects 
do, and just want to sell licenses. Right now I am not able to build a 
business case to justify it - the answer would be "let's migrate to 
Subversions - same features and still free". As long as I keep on using 
CVSNT I hope one day it could offer enough to be an appealing purchase or 
our budget is large enough to accomodate supporting some open source project 
(I can't see why we shouldn't support others too), if we are forced to 
migrate to another tool, well, it's very difficult we could return back.

-- 
Luigi D. Sandon