[boost] Re: Re: Moving from CVS to Subversion?

From: Edward Diener (eddielee_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-05 14:57:15

Walter Landry wrote:
> David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>> In any case, getting a new host (OSL) may solve some of this.
>>
>> Maybe, but as I've been saying, the problems with update are
>> substantially due to the way CVS works.
>>
>>>   there are constant stale locks,
>>>
>>> This problem mostly goes away with distributed systems.
>>
>> And completely goes away with SVN.
>
> It can never completely go away.  If you have multiple people who can
> modify a repository, you have to have locks.  Then things can happen
> (network goes away) that prevent you from freeing the lock.

SVN does not have locks. If more than one person attempts to commit a file
after someone else has made and committed changes at a later date than the
initial date for the second person's working copy of the file, SVN prevents
the change until a merge is done from the latest source on the repository.
Of course there is an automatic merging mechanism which will help the second
person to do their merge, but the general mechanism hold true.

Now this may be described as a "lock" but actually nothing ever gets locked
in the sense of retrieving data from the repository. The potential "lock"
only occurs when one attempts to commit an updated copy. To me this is a big
step in the conceptual model which CVS employs.