From: Avdi Grimm <avdi@...>
Date: 2007-04-05T23:07:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Why SVN?

On 4/4/07, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:
> backups. I simply can't say that about much of any other VCS out
> there (except the nice stable old ones, like CVS).

Speaking as someone who was tasked with setting up and administering a
CVS server for a small team a couple years ago:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  CVS stable?  Trust CVS with your data?  That's rich.

I'm not saying any other system is necessarily better; but treating
CVS as some kind of gold standard of reliability is hilarious.  We're
talking about a system that can't even guarantee atomic commits.  And
for which maintenance releases sometimes randomly break major features
and have to be manually patched.  And which requires having a sysadmin
(or a knowledgeable user) around to periodically clean up orphan
lockfiles which break the repository.

The only thing CVS has going for it is that it is simple,
comparatively speaking.  And often that's the most important
consideration.  But it's only stable and reliable in comparison to
Visual Source Safe.

-- 
Avdi