Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

Posted Dec 9, 2004 22:23 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed by gdt
Parent article: Looking Past CVS: The Future is Distributed

I really have trouble with your notion that CVS is easy to set up. I've found it near-impossible to securely configure an anonymous CVS which allows a few maintainers to update the repository.

If you find that hard, don't do it. Give accounts to your maintainers, and let them use it with ssh.

In a large company SVN leveraging off Apache is a good thing. Sysadmins already have authentication and authorisation configured for Apache and extending this to SVN is trivial. So you get to use your "real" userid and password. And it runs over HTTPS no there's no fiddling about with SSH tunnels and craziness.

It runs over what? Our sysadmin wouldn't know how to make Apache authentication use our "real" userid, and I don't know it, either.

We have sshd running on every server, and Apache on exactly one, and that's a pretty crufty machine, where Subversion is guaranteed not to install (it's even too picky for my Fedore Core 1 AMD64 box, and my bug report about that to users@subversion.tigris.org vanished in the void).

In contrast, using CVS over ssh is easy and trouble-free, and I don't even have to use a password (thanks to .ssh/authorized_keys). No tunneling necessary, just set

export CVS_RSH=ssh

and use a command like the following for checkout

cvs -d :ext:user@host:root-path checkout directory

Any chance that svn will ever be as convenient and simple?

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export CVS_RSH=ssh
cvs -d :ext:user@host:root-path checkout directory

svn checkout svn+ssh://user@host/root-path directory