Re: GWindows and David Botton

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

Stephen Leake writes:
> If Meta-CVS is a purely client tool, then each developer can use it
> or not; it doesn't have to be a project-wide choice.

Yes, it has to be project-wide.  The way Meta-CVS works is this:

- every file in your source tree gets a unique ID

- every file is stored in the root directory of the module in the CVS
  server under that ID

- a separate text file establishes the mapping between the unique IDs
  and the path name of each file

- when you do a "mcvs checkout module", it creates a directory
  module/MCVS under which the flat directory structure is checked out,
  then it recreates the tree using the metadata file.  It uses hard
  links if the filesystem allows that, copies otherwise.

So, using Meta-CVS instead of CVS changes the file structure of the
server.  For example:

/var/lib/cvs/my_project:
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src    2811 2003-08-23 20:17 F-FFA4733D2CD1E8D430F20908D38BE0DE.ads,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src   12137 2003-08-23 20:17 F-FFAE5C4ABA0AF1F53C01902609AC2355.ads,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src   41326 2003-08-31 19:48 F-FFE3C9276E16694199815F68FAF5B7C0.adb,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src    3846 2003-08-31 19:48 F-FFFE9E8E3AEE3959A23BBE6EAEE0672A.adb,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src    6135 2003-08-31 19:48 F-FFFF334EDA1C38D47B5FB63CC0CDD729.adb,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src  366052 2003-08-31 19:48 MAP,v
-r--r--r--  1 lbrenta src    3300 2003-08-31 19:48 TYPES,v

You can of course use the regular CVS client, but it's not exactly
user-friendly :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.