Opinion: open source-"supported" CVS backup capabilities are very weak

[Philip Bondi <pj...@SystemDatabase.com>]

Open source-"supported" CVS backup capabilities are very weak.  Simple
solutions require potentially high-bandwidth brute force techniques.

For personal purposes, I've recently investigated CVSUP, CSUP, CVSYNC
and DCVS.

CVSUP seems to be the reigning king.  However, it is neither available
for RHEL5 nor Windows nor Solaris (SPARC) 10.  It is supported on
BSD.  So this is an RHEL4/BSD solution only.  I used CVSUP
successfully for a couple of years on RHEL3 and Solaris 8.  This
successful "experiment" ended in Dec. 2006 when I upgraded my SPARC
box to Solaris 10.  It will be buried when I (imminently) retire my
RHEL3 server, in favour of my RHEL5 server.

The simple CVS repository backup solution using RSYNC works fine on
LANs or low cost WANs.  However, a CVS TAG operation that affects a
large group of files will cause retransmission of entire RCS archive
files.

The only widely-supported, multi-platform, open source, viable
solution for low-bandwidth repository backup is Subversion.

Over this Christmas break, my respect for CVS has been significantly
eroded.  The open source community has (in my opinion) clearly turned
its back on CVS.

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Re: Opinion: open source-"supported" CVS backup capabilities are very weak

[Les Mikesell <le...@gmail.com>]

Philip Bondi wrote:

> The simple CVS repository backup solution using RSYNC works fine on
> LANs or low cost WANs.  However, a CVS TAG operation that affects a
> large group of files will cause retransmission of entire RCS archive
> files.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the subversion mail list, but I 
think you are underestimating what rsync does.  When files are changed, 
it uses a block-checksum comparison technique to identify and only 
transmit the changed blocks.  If you use the -v option with rsync it 
will mention all the changed filenames but, depending on the nature of 
the change, it will be efficient about sending the differences and 
reconstructing the files.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com

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