Re: [9fans] Publish and be damned.

[Eric Lee Green <eric@badtux.org>]

Boyd Roberts wrote:
> From: "Lucio De Re" <lucio@proxima.alt.za>
> > I have raised that cry before, but I seem to be just a voice in
> > the wilderness.  However, I can offer a public CVS repository for
> > those who, like me, think that incomplete source is nothing to be
> > ashamed of.
>
> why not just manage a web page with links to the originals
> as a first cut.  then if it works out move on to a more
> complex solution?
>
>     plan to throw one away, you will anyway ...
>
> the web is well established, but CVS?

Huh? CVS is the standard Unix source control system. Most major software
development projects on Unix are managed either using CVS or one of its
commercial competitors. FreeBSD, Apache, etc. all have publically
accessible CVS archives for their developers (CVS has a couple of
different Internet protocols so that unlike, say, Microsoft SourceSafe,
you can use it over the Internet). In fact, you can go to their web site
and browse the CVS archives with your web browser -- click on a file in
the directory tree, and you can see its complete revision history all
the way back to the beginning of time (or 1992, whichever is first :-),
and can click on any of those revisions to see what was that program
looked like at any one of those points in time. CVS also has all the
usual branch management stuff etc., though they are unnecessarily
difficult to use (sigh, at work we have a page on our intranet web site
that tells our engineers nothing except what convulated gibberish CVS
commands to use to create branches, tag releases, and merge changes from
a stable branch into the current development branch).

It puzzles me why you would be opposed to using a standard source
control system to, err, control source? Especially the source control
system that is standard for Internet software (virtually all of the
standard Internet software, such as Apache and Sendmail, are managed via
CVS). Now, I don't know what source control program is used by Bell Labs
internally to manage the Plan 9 sources. If it's a free one, and there's
a web front end to it, that might be the better alternative. I think
Lucio threw out CVS as a possibility because that's what he has, and
would be open to other alternatives -- if anybody offered one, rather
than simply carping that they don't understand standard software
development tools.

There's a right way to do things, and there's an easy way to do things,
and usually the two are completely different ways :-}. The deal is,
though, that in the long term the right way is always easier. As I've
learned to my regret in the past, when 6 months after the project is
released I'm called back to fix it the right way instead of the
quick'n'dirty easy way that I rigged it due to sheer laziness :-}. If
you're going to do a web browser for source code, doing it the right way
(via a web front end into a real source code management system) is,
well, the right way (sigh).

--
Eric Lee Green  http://www.badtux.org  mailto:eric@badtux.org
     Phoenix Branch -- Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs
              Cruisin' the USENET since 1985