[cvsnt] Q to CVSNT committers: CVSNT maintenance - how does it happen?

Stasko, Roger Roger.Stasko at LibertyMutual.com
Thu Feb 13 22:35:25 GMT 2003


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Having followed this newsgroup for a while, Eclipse/WebSphere Studio support for CVSNT has been a regular topic.  Official support from the Eclipse community would be greatly appreciated.  Remember that among all the corporate developers who are using Eclipse/WebSphere Studio with CVS/Unix, you will find a high percentage of them using Eclipse/WebSphere Studio at home with CVSNT.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin McGuire [mailto:kevin_mcguire at ca.ibm.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 1:25 PM
To: cvsnt at cvsnt.org
Subject: [cvsnt] Q to CVSNT committers: CVSNT maintenance - how does it happen?


Hello CVSNT committer community,

I am the team lead for the Eclipse Team (VCM) support (www.eclipse.org), an open source software tooling platform.  It is my group that provides the CVS client for Eclipse.  And a darn fine client it is if I do say so myself :)

I would like to understand the process by which bugs get fixed in CVSNT, the size of the community of active contributors, and the relationship between the Linux code base and the CVSNT code base.

In the past, we've made best effort to support CVSNT as a server, but
*officially* we've only supported the Linux server. Naturally, this stance is less than desirable given the size of the CVSNT community.

One reason for our hesitation is that on occassion a new CVSNT server version will surface new bugs.  It is important to understand that we are somewhat sensitive to the implementation details of CVS since we read/interpret text returned from commands, generate commands, and attempt to preserve a relatively complex UI state.  Thus a change which might be innocuous for most CVS users can break our client.  Since we actively use CVS linux for Eclipse itself, it gets much more in-use testing than CVSNT.

If we understood better the development process, then we might be able to make a greater commitment to CVSNT.  For example,

Q: If a bug is fixed in the Linux version, how and when does it get migrated to CVSNT?

Q: Similary, if a new CVS Linux version is released, how does this migrate to a CVSNT version?

Q: Aside from NT specific areas, do fixes in CVSNT find their way back to Linux, and how/when?  Or, is there a common code base that always moves forward on Linux and then is migrated?

Q:  How many active committers are there on CVSNT and how often do they work on it?  I am trying to understand the size of the push behind CVSNT maintenance and the frequency.

Q:  What problems do you see with the maintenance process?  For example, do you find it works well, or do you need more active committers, or committers who can spend more time on CVSNT?

Q:  Are there people who work on both CVSNT and CVS linux mainteance?

Q:  It seems that the appearance of CVSNT versions is somewhat uncorrelated with Linux versions.  For example, there may be nothing for CVSNT for awhile, then several versions (usually minor 'letter' version upgrades).  Is this accurate, and if so how does this come about?  For example, is it because a committer will book off some time and work a lot on CVSNT, then can't for awhile due to requirements of their "day job"?

Any answers to these questions by those active in developing CVSNT would be highly appreciated.  Since this information may affect our product plans, frank and accurate data is essential.

Thanking you for your time,
Kevin McGuire


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