Python, licenses and CVS

[Roy Smith]

Paul Rubin <phr-n2001d at nightsong.com> wrote:
> CVS is a layer over RCS that lets multiple people work on the same
> files at the same time, and automatically merges their changes at
> check-in.

That is certainly the theory, but I'm not sure how well it works in 
practice.

I use CVS on a fairly large project (my team of 10 people deals with about 
2500 source files, and that's about half the whole project).  For us, the 
real advantage of CVS vs. RCS is the ability to keep our sources on a 
remote server (yes, we could probably do the same thing with RCS over NFS, 
but we're not big NFS fans).  The relatively new http front end to CVS also 
makes a really cool source browser.

Although we do not enforce it with locked checkouts, we really prefer to 
work in the "one person editing a file at a time" mode.  If we ever go to 
check a file back in and discover it's got changes to merge from somebody 
else's work, we generally consider that a problem, and at the very least, 
manually verify that the merged changes make sense.

We organize our stuff so it's very modular -- lots of small files, each 
with a very self-contained bit of code.  If two different people find 
themselves working on the same source file at the same time, it's more 
likely to be a breakdown in intra-team communication than anything else.  I 
could see how with a project organized differently, that might not be the 
case.

But, to make a long story short, for a small project, with just one person 
working on the code, and more importantly, will all the development 
happening on a single machine, RCS should do just fine and it's probably 
simplier to learn and set up.

Does anybody actually use SCCS any more?

We've been watching subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) with 
interest, but I'm guessing it's six months to a year before it'll be stable 
enough to risk running a major production project on it.