Re: [9fans] rev control

[Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>]

I was thinking about the CVS issue earlier today, and I couldn't see
any problems normally "solved" by CVS and its ilk that couldn't be
addressed by Plan 9's inherent facilities, and a little scripting
(compared to a lot of scripting for a UNIX system without a version
control system).

Obviously, yesterday is the heart of things. Equally important is
the namespace; multiple views through a global set of files is
the norm, not a special feature.

Tagging could be as simple as doing a find of a tree, and saving
the result in a file named after the tag.

The biggest gap appears to be a change log for commentary. Even
there, Plan 9's append-only file permissions reduce the need for
something complex down to "cat".

I'm not saying that it all becomes trivial; any large and/or complex
project tends to bite you in ways you didn't expect. I do think that
Plan 9 is a better place to start from, though.

Having said all that, I wonder whether there isn't a system in place
already because of the way Plan 9 itself has been developed. presotto
mentions a large project where no two versions ran the same code.
In constrast, almost all of Plan 9 is single-source. I suspect this
has been highly significant in the level of perceived need for a
management system.

steve