Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage Git migration - clean cut or git-cvsserver

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Ezequiel Garcia <elezegarcia@×××××.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Arun Raghavan <ford_prefect@g.o> wrote:
>> I, for one, think we should stay with CVS and leave all this git
>> Linusware to the new-fangled Fedora kids with their fancy init systems
>> and tight coupling. CVS was good enough for my grandfather, and it's
>> good enough for you.
>
> Perhaps it would be instructive if you could tell us one advantage of
> cvs over git.
>

Sure.  The slow commit rate encourages careful deliberation before
hitting the enter key, which therefore improves quality.

Then, if you do make a mistake the slow commit rate means that fixing
that mistake can take a long time, which increases the amount of pain
our end-users run into due to the mistake, which leads to lots of
flame wars on -dev.  That means that the guy who made the mistake is
subjected to more public ridicule, and is less likely to do it again,
That improves quality too.

Since cvs doesn't tie together tree-wide changes in a nice way or
allow them to be transactionally completed, individual package
maintainers don't need to be as concerned with the big picture view.
Now as the maintainer of libfoo the fact that somebody changed my
ebuild without making a corresponding change in some profile is
completely hidden from me, and I can go to sleep peacefully without
realizing that my users are all going to have horribly broken systems
in the morning.  Blissful ignorance of end-user suffering improves
developer morale, and helps get rid of pesky users at the same time.

cvs also makes more more aware of what is going on around me.  Anytime
I want to work on something in parallel with the main development
branch I get to manually merge changes in, which keeps me aware of my
place in the world.  That means that I'm less likely to build nice new
features, which means fewer bugs, which improves quality, and may even
drive away users as an added bonus!

See, cvs is really the wave of the future!

Rich