Re: time to be serious about dropping CVS

Phil Muldoon
2010-01-08T12:58:54Z

On 01/01/2010 08:01 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> Since I started using SVN, and even more so since I started using git,
> I have found that using CVS is very inconvenient, bordering on unbearable.

Beyond the usual arguments and cons about CVS, the one thing that
really bites is that CVS always has to talk to a remote server. It is
not distributed, so there is no local repository copy. On a small
project that is ok, but currently diffs with GDB CVS take 12-15
minutes. Commits are the same. The same operations in GIT take
seconds. It is even worse in the US 8am - 6pm hours. This might be
because I live in the UK, and the server is on another continent.
Maybe folks closer to the server get a snappier response. But if
there was problem that a distributed version control system was meant
to fix, it was this.

I don't know why CVS is so slow. Whether it is CPU bound on the
sourceware machine, or the bandwidth at the hosting site is at
capacity .. who knows? I'm not even sure how to find out. But would
SVN solve any of the problem relating to performance?

My preference is for GIT, simply because of the speed.

Cheers,

Phil