[admin (no pm's please)]

Or is that coding?

For those that may be interested in such things, an important part of professional coding is revision/change control on files and for the last 12 years we have been using Microsoft SourceSafe which is proprietary and has never been really satisfactory.

Since mainly switching work to Linux we have made a couple of attempts to change to something better, but not quite managed it

But this week we have finally got CVS up and running, and following a few teething issues I think it will work well

The benefits lie in the ability to log/review and if need be roll back changes made to myff forums code, and our other projects. We had all that of course with SourceSafe (though I have been constantly surprised at how many companies I have seen who fail to have revision control at all) but CVS is just that much more usable as a solution.

I am partially making this post to try and impress upon people wanting loads of extra forum hacks, that for things to be done professionally and hence reliably, a lot of time does have to be spent on the systems that help protect the forums from risks like a bad code change not being traceable and removable.

There is an awful lot of work that does go on, that customers simply don't see.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think we are finally done with an external drive being used as the repository rather than a totally independent server.

Had a play with eclipses an open source all singing all dancing development tool which also integrates with CVS, and this wreaked havoc as typical of monolithic code it grinds to a buggy halt when dealing with a very big project like myff

So we are back to the more standard unix model of many little tools that do jobs well.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Having quite a bit of fun now playing with this, there are 5 different tools I have installed now to help view the CVS system in different ways.

The decision to go with the tried and trusted CVS has parallels with the whole phpBB2/phpBB3 debate, there are older systems than CVS that were clearly superceded by it, but also a newer replacement subversion which has more bells and whistles.

A number of projects might gain significant benefit from the extra features of subversion, but CVS is tried, tested and easy to use and like phpbb2 is not some first attempt at a system, but something built on years of experience with other systems.

phpbb2 addresses 95% of what people need to do with a forum, and CVS addresses 95% of what a code revision system needs. As with phpbb2 for almost anything extra you might really need there is a hack out there to add it.

So for example CVS lacks a recursive add, but I have both a script and a GUI interface that will do that for me.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Another observation or two. I am the sort of person who when buying furniture from a store, will be pretty brutal with it, if things break in store they won't last long at home.

Software is no different, and I have been doing some rather nasty things to the CVS system, it is not very hard to damage, but the fact that it uses plain text files distributed through out the directory structures renders it very resilient and correctable.

Again the analogy to phpbb2 v phpbb3 comes into play, phpbb2 has one or two internal database constructs that are a bit of a pain if things go wrong, but they go wrong very very rarely. phpbb3 is a much tricker proposition

[CodyT07]

Just to make sure this is CVS your talking about right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System

[admin (no pm's please)]

That's the one, just noticed in the text that it was developed in the 80's. I thought it was later than that, I was using RCS in the 90's. RCS being a lot cruder and the predecessor of CVS, so I thought CVS was rather later.

It is notable though that SourceSafe which we have been using, we are on a late 90's version, but for all practical purposes the basic CVS architecture wipes the floor with the Microsoft product.

I expect I keep boring people by banging on with this point, but there reaches the point with any software concept, where a new version with extra bells and whistles becomes a retrograde step.

I defy anyone to come up with any killer features todays bloatware word processors have over Lotus AmiPro from 1994? and that was about a 4mb total install size if I recall rightly.

I think the reason we have gone the portal route with the forum is a reflection of this view. We have a core phpbb2 forum that does all anyone really needs out of a forum, but for the odd extras we develop add on portals that do not add bloat to the core.