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CVS and the "feature branch"

CVS is a fun package to maintain. Hang on, I'll start again. <fx: raises sarcasm hand> CVS is a fun package to maintain.

It's to be expected, I suppose - it's a package with a lot of history, and lots of technical users who generally know what they want and have strong opinions on how things should work. This means that unexpected behaviour tends to be noticed and reported fairly quickly. The fact that there is so much history and so many users makes fixing some of the core bugs and issues very difficult to fix - any change in behaviour is likely to annoy people, especially those that have written scripts to work with CVS.

I made a decision quite a while ago to go with the CVS "feature" branch (aka 1.12.x) instead of the "stable" (1.11.x) branch for a few reasons, the most important being the addition of PAM support for authentication. I'll freely admit that this was a somewhat selfish decision (I maintain a CVS server at work that needed PAM), but until recently it seemed to be the right move. Now I'm not so sure. There have been one hell of a lot of changes in the 1.12.x series, including many to the standard interfaces that people use. That alone wouldn't be a problem, but there's no sign yet of those features being frozen and 1.12.x being stabilised. The way things are looking now, we're going to be shipping sarge with a development snapshot of CVS, and I'm not very happy with that.

I also never find enough time to fix the bugs reported against CVS, and there are many. I'm going to try and get some of the "cvs login" bugs triaged soon, so I can check what's going on and get some patches upstream. It's quite likely that some of the older bugs in that area are already fixed, but they can be difficult to reproduce at the best of times.

Why are there never enough hours in the day?

12:52 :: # :: /debian/packages :: 1 comment