[cvsnt-dev] Re: Feature Request: warnings on edit

Oliver Giesen ogware at gmx.net
Tue Jun 29 12:47:14 BST 2004


Community technical support mailing list was retired 2010 and replaced with a professional technical support team. For assistance please contact: Pre-sales Technical support via email to sales@march-hare.com.


Christian Schmidt wrote:

> BTW I think edit on tagged or not up-to-date files _is_ an error - or at
> least it's an action that the user should be warned of.

A warning sounds like good idea I think.


>>I would question whether anyone would ever edit 'many' files and if
>>they were whether CVS was the best tool for them.
> 
> Why? We use this feature sometimes to temporarily prevent users from
> modifing certain directories.

Now that's "abuse" not "use". It's certainly not what the Edit command 
was intended for. The whole point of CVS is "allowing nevertheless 
without troubles" not "preventing just because" IMO. The Edit mechanism 
is a means for easing collaboration and team coordination as it lets you 
see who's doing what at the moment (without imposing any restrictions at 
the same time). The preventive functionality that Reserved Edit adds on 
top of that was borne from a technical inconvenience (namely that some 
files (especially binary files) could not be automatically merged) and 
not from the desire to lock certain people out.

If you want to set up access/commit restrictions for certain users or 
user groups you should use ACLs instead. And those *are* branch aware BTW.


> But you can't edit a tagged version of the file. At least you can't commit
> changes to a tagged file, 

You could commit. All you have to do is:

a) reset the sticky tag or update to the tip of the respective branch - 
this might result in a merge and even a conflict if the tagged revision 
was out of date and was binary (or otherwise unmergeable)

or

b) create a new branch off that revision and update to it

I can see that most of the time both alternatives are not desirable but 
it's simply not true that committing isn't possible. I have used both 
approaches lots of times before, though admittedly not with unmergeable 
files...

Cheers,

-- 
Oliver
----	------------------
JID:	ogiesen at jabber.org
ICQ:	18777742	(http://wwp.icq.com/18777742)


More information about the cvsnt-dev mailing list