Re: renames under CVS

[Noel Yap]

--- Paul Sander <address@hidden> wrote:
> >Huh?  What kind of idiocity is that?  Since when
> are renames an absolute
> >requirement of maintenance?  Anyone silly enough to
> do a rename during
> >maintenance and to do so only on the patch branch,
> is going to get what
> >they deserve!  (I.e. a whole lot of unnecessary
> confusion and a lot of
> >extra manual work during merges! :-)
> 
> Renames are not usually a requirement of
> maintenance, but they are a
> requirement of new development.  Bug fixes are done
> during maintenance,
> and merged into new development.  That means that
> bug fixes are merged
> into new development, often after prior new
> development involved renames.
> This mode of operation is common!  Sometimes renames
> are done on a task
> branch and folded into the next release, and I've
> seen this more often
> than I care to remember on vendor branches.

And when doing XP, there really is no maintenance
phase; it's all new development.

> Just because a tool is "standard" does not mean it's
> well-known or
> well-supported.  40% of the Unix platforms I use
> regularly (Solaris and
> NetBSD) don't even supply the tool, and I admit that
> this is a much lower
> number than I expected.  (AIX, HP-UX, and MacOS X do
> supply it.)

Hmmm, I had it in the version of Solaris I was using. 
I wonder if it was something extra our admins decided
to tag on, something your admins decided to remove (or
not install), or your version just didn't ship with
it.

> When's the last time anyone's used tsort(1), join(1)
> or fmt(1), or even
> cut(1), paste(1) or fold(1), and Greg's favorite
> ed(1), even on this list
> that's full of toolsmiths?  

Not to shoot a bubble in your argument, Paul, but I've
used cut and ed at least once or twice in the last
couple of years.  But then, that is way more often
than the number of times I've had to contend with
renamed files.

I've never even heard of some of the other commands
you've listed.

>ls, diff, ln, cc, ld,
> vi, more, make, dbx, nm,
> ar, tar, cp, chmod, ftp, cd, pwd, compress, sort,
> gzip (despite its non-
> standard status), telnet, xterm, id, mailx, echo,
> test, date, and perhaps
> a dozen or so other standard tools plus another
> dozen or so shop-specific
> tools make up the world as far as my developers are
> concerned.  Virtually
> everything else to them is as obscure and unknown to
> them as the tools I
> listed in the first sentence of this paragraph. 
> Because the developers
> are doing the merging and they don't know about
> "patch", chances are they
> won't choose to use it.

In fact, I think diff3 is a more appropriate tool to
use than patch.  (diff3 is actually the reason I used
ed :-).

Noel


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com