[cvsnt] Betr.: CVSNT to CVS

Bryce Schober bryce.schober at gmail.com
Tue Apr 7 16:53:49 BST 2009


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On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Arthur Barrett <
arthur.barrett at march-hare.com> wrote:

> Ponkumar S,
>
> > Does CVSNT to SVN conversion is supported.
> >
>
> Generally people move from SVN to CVSNT not the other way around, since
> CVSNT has more features than SVN you will LOSE information and features.
>

Authur, I know that you must feel the need to promote your product, but this
statement is both unlikely and probably unsupportable. Even if your
experience showed more conversions to CVSNT than from, that would be exactly
be what I would expect as a CVSNT vendor. People aren't going to come to the
CVSNT experts to get their repositories converted to SVN, they'll only come
to you to get converted to CVSNT.

I admit that CVSNT does have more features than SVN at this point. On the
other hand, it has been choking on our large repository, using some of the
"features" have caused us more trouble that they were worth (rename), and it
isn't doesn't have critical mass in the software development community.

This last point can't be stressed enough, in my experience. For whatever
reason, CVSNT never got the widespreadd acceptance in the software
development community that other SCMs have. On its merits, CVSNT is an
excellent platform, and has served us very well for years, and saved us from
the horrors of VSS. I suspect that it is at least partly the attitude I've
occasionally seen expressed by Arthur and company that has led to this lack
of popularity - though admittedly I really have no solid reason why.

Regardless, CVSNT was never really mainstream, and so now it's a bit stuck
in its own ghetto. CVS, for all its warts, was at least in the mainstream,
and so migrating from it to newer, better SCMs is at least well supported.
CVSNT doesn't have that luxury. It can give you the features of today, and
probably serve most very well, but it's a bit of a dead-end road because of
lack of acceptance, and I'm afraid EVS is bound to the same fate. I'm sure
it will prove to be an excellent solution for some, and give March Hare a
solid platform on which to compete with newer whiz-bangy SCMs, but it will
also never be mainstream.

And so, when you do finally get to that point where the newer features make
a solid business case in your scenario, you'll be stuck without an easy
upgrade path. That has been my pain for the last several months. Converting
to SVN, I'll still have the comfort of the good GUI tools and integrations
that I enjoy with CVSNT, but I'll also have a much less painful upgrade path
for that time when converting on to the distributed SCMs like git/Hg/etc
makes good business sense.

--
Bryce Schober


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