(2003-11-12) Hess Personal Cvs

JoeyHess uses CVS for his whole "home" directory (personal data, software configuration tweaks, etc.). (Actually, this article was written in Sept'02: he comments himself that he's now using SubVersion.) Every morning (er, afternoon) when I came into work, I'd cvs up while I read the morning mail. In the evening, I'd cvs commit and then update my laptop for the trip home. When I got home, I'd sync up again, dive right back into whatever I'd been doing at work and keep on rolling until late at night - when I committed, went to bed and began the cycle all over again... I attend many tradeshows and other events that require me to sit down at some computer out of the box, use it for an hour or a day and never see it again. I can check out the core of my CVS home directory in about five minutes, and after that it is just as comfortable as if I'd SSH'd home and was doing everything there. I even get my whole desktop set up in that five minutes... Then there are CVS's famous problems: poor handling of directories and binary files. The nearly nonexistent handling of permissions, which is not a big deal in most projects but becomes important when you have a home directory with some public and some private files and directories in it. A slow, bloated protocol, hindered even more by the necessity of piping it all over SSH; the pain of trying to move a file that is already in CVS, or much worse, a whole directory tree, again hits you especially hard when you're using CVS for the whole home directory.