On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 08:11:23AM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > I think it's a good idea. On every new system I install, "cvs" fails
> > mysteriously until I remember to set CVS_RSH=ssh. Who uses "rsh"
> > nowadays, anyway? ("pserver" != "rsh")
>
> C'mon... you don't have a tarball of your default shell environment
> that you dump on any new machine?

No. (I use "rsync", so I have to remember to set RSYNC_RSH=ssh.)
Enough of my problems...

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 11:03:53AM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
> > 	Most people tend to use cvs over ssh nowdays - particularly
> > 	anyone dealing with the NetBSD source tree (pkgsrc included).
>
> I believe that that's factually incorrect. Most NetBSD developers
> MIGHT tend to do cvs *commits* over ssh nowadays, but I can't
> imagine that anyone in their right mind would be doing a large
> checkout or an update over ssh, especially not over the really-real
> Internet.

The initial checkout is likely to be slow, granted, but for the
updates, the Internet is not the issue. "cvs" works its magic by
transferring the cost of bit-moving over the network, to heavier disk
i/o and cpu work on the hosts. With a PIII/500 dual MP, UW-LVD SCSI
disk, 28.8 connection, it takes something like *15m* to update the
whole NetBSD "src" tree.

It's also neat that I can set up a local cvs repository on a host
that I already have ssh access to, and a cvs checkout from that host
(through the Internet) just works.

> I use rsh over a private gigabit network with CVS all the time.

Well, OK. Some people still use "rsh". I'll grant you, it may even be
a reasonable choice in your particular case, since the costs of "ssh",
made bearable by faster cpus, rise again with greater bandwidth. But
now that you've so eloquently established that only a moron would have
trouble setting an environment variable, what's the big deal?  Or more
to the point, why is it so hard to build consensus here on the tiniest
thing?

> Speaking as a sysadmin in a corporate environment that uses cvs over
> rsh, this would really piss me off. (That's all speculation in a
> void, of course, because it's basically impossible to use NetBSD as
> anything but my workstation here anyhow...)

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 11:10:50AM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > Yes. ;-) Now answer this: does anyone honestly use cvs over rsh
> > anymore?
>
> Yes. All of my developers do on a daily basis.

Well, that cooks it then. It's just three "for", and "all your
developers" -- surely an innumerably great number of people, whom
you speak for unequivocally, "against". In fact, since you now hold
the quorum, we should probably just ask you first before doing
anything. I'm curious though, how many people, exactly, do you claim
to represent? There are greater than one hundred NetBSD developers
scattered all over the world, using "ssh" to connect to the main cvs
server (over the Internet), vs. ???.

> > The code changes involved are tiny.
>
> So why not do them in our default environment rather than in
> imported code?

Frankly because, that would inconvenience me, as opposed to you. I
guess I was being selfish.

> Along those lines, why don't we just adopt Subversion? I'm sure some
> other projects would follow our lead, and I understand the CVS
> people in fact *want* that to happen.
>
> (Please don't take that as a troll. Let's not have a source
> versioning software argument. It was intended rhetorically.)

So I'll answer rhetorically:  because even the tiniest user-visible
change leads to beating the drums of war, and so must never be
tolerated.

I have nothing more to say on this topic.

Frederick