[ On Friday, April 30, 1999 at 00:32:05 (-0600), Miles Nordin wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVSup collections for a NetBSD CVS tree
>
> If CVSup's author wanted to maximally respect the earlier work upon which
> CVSup is based, and to be of the greatest possible benefit to the 'net
> community, he would have contributed his ideas and coding to the CVS
> project.  Certainly this is not the only legitimate reason to write code,
> but I believe this ideology is central to NetBSD.  Using and importing a
> package means using and importing its ideology, too, and CVSup is poor in
> that respect.

Having been one of the CVS "developers" for quite some time now I can
assure you that contributing CVSup to the CVS "project" would have been,
and probably still is, completely impossible.  The politics of CVS make
NetBSD's look like kids squabbling over toys in a sandbox!  ;-)

> From what I'm hearing, CVSup sounds like an exciting demonstration of good
> computer science.  I can understand the feeling of seeing something you
> always imagined was an impractical dream (ex. Coda, H-PFQ), crystallized
> into reality, into code you can build, inspect, and execute. I do not want
> to diminish CVSup's contribution--the way it has optimized the
> ``minimize-rtt's, send only delta'' idea, the critical ``local branch''
> concept--but for NetBSD, it's useful contribution is limited to these
> valuable ideas.  The code itself shouldn't be used.

Until someone comes up with something equally effective to replace
CVSup, CVSup can and should be used.  Period.  If it is indeed no more
than an academic toy, as you suggest, then perhaps users will become
frustrated with it and look for something better, perhaps even
frustrated enough to invent and implement something better.  However in
the mean time it exists as it is and has been adequately proven to be
very effective in production.  If you don't like it then you're
completely free not to use it, but you cannot say what others must do.

> The other value of CVSup to NetBSD is in its conspicuous rejection:  for
> users to understand _why_ CVSup, in spite of its technical elegance,
> cannot be endorsed as a portal to the official central CVS tree.

Oh, my goodness.  You really were not paying attention.  Nobody is
talking about putting CVSup *into* NetBSD.  At best it would only become
another of the zillion packages in pkgsrc and a service running on a
machine in the netbsd.org domain.

> My own opinion: 
> The scale of a hypothetical Modula-3 porting project is out-of-line with
> the benefit of more efficient source updates.  It's an interesting
> project, but it should be considered for what it is: an interesting
> project, not an answer to NetBSD's CVS distribution need.

Fine, then just leave the job to those of us who will find it
worthwhile!  Nobody has said that it must become *the* answer to
NetBSD's CVS distribution needs -- only one (possibly small) part of the
solution.

> the greatest number.  _I_ could use CVSup, yet I want _not_ to have it.

Then get out of the way!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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