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by harel 4503 days ago
That's true, in a way, until someone tries to force CVS on you. Yes they are all sideline tools but once you get used to something, its the best thing in the world, until you get used to something else. Change is great, but not quite appreciated enough.
2 comments
ygra 4503 days ago
At work (where my script to convert all of our projects from CVS to Hg is complete for almost ¾ of a year now) I now resort to a hacky PowerShell script that allows me to work locally with Hg and then push selected revisions to CVS. Mostly because I fear that we won't ditch CVS for quite a while and when we do I'm probably the one to blame for lost developer productivity while we're coming to grips with a new tool.
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harel 4503 days ago
So many wrongs in one comment. The fact you believe you'll be blamed for dev productivity loss is just not right. Blame? The fact you have to write scripts converting from one source control to another is not good, the fact you resort to hacky powershelling is scary. I wasn't even thinking the "are they still using cvs in 2014" even but I guess I should have. "blame" should exist in source control systems only.
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ygra 4503 days ago
Actually I was agreeing to your point that at the time when CVS is used version control is no longer "just a tool" but a PITA.

I'm the one who suggested conversion to a newer system, so when the other developers need to re-learn and lose a week of productivity that way it is my fault, to some extent.

My conversion script is essentially just automating creating cvs2hg config files for a number of CVS modules (and cleaning up before/after conversion) because our CVS repo is a few GiB in size, containing everything that ever existed (and plenty of things beside that) so a 1:1 conversion isn't that ideal, especially because it will lead to frequent (harmless) merges. But to developers with a CVS background merges are scary.

My cvshg PowerShell script is based around https://wiki.mozilla.org/Using_Mercurial_locally_with_CVS and http://pavelchikulaev.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/using-mercuri..., but tailored to how I use the tools. It allows me to commit happily locally and histedit later when I need commits I can actually share with others.

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harel 4503 days ago
That's different then, I agree. I read your original comment as if you're tasked with something and then expect to be blamed for it.
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sixthloginorso 4503 days ago
Yeah, well, there are hammers of many brands, but few have claws on both ends, as the analogy for a certain controversial piece of technology went.
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