> At this point, CVS is almost their barrier to entry: if you're (royal you, not rhapsodyv) going to complain a bunch about the version control tool, you're probably not going to be an active member of their developer community.
CVS is frankly hideous. Saying "git is way too complicated" is another way of saying "CVS is way underpowered". However, a good reason to cling to this relic of a bygone age is that, as far as I know, they have everything in CVS, and it must be a lot more convenient to be able to checkout an arbitrary part of their dev tree than messing around with git submodules.
That said, if their attitude is really "if you complain about CVS, you are not worthy", that is bound to turn off many people, and for good reason.
CVS fits their development methodology just fine, so far. Having a central CVS repo, where development is done in "head" which gets branched every 6 months for a release.
Contributions are supposed to never break "head", so mostly small easy to review patches are commited. Even big changes are committed on a per patch basis, working towards a bigger goal.
Also there is AnonCVS, which mirrors the central CVS repo on dozens of mirrors. The same way you can mirror the CVS repo for yourself locally.
Sure CVS+AnonCVS+diff(1) could be better(whatever that means), but it does the job. Switching is hard, losing history is bad and putting off old developers is way more dangerous than discouraging new ones.
Using mailing lists and CVS is the price to pay to partake.
> CVS fits their development methodology just fine, so far.
That's what I am saying. However, there is a big difference between "we use CVS for good reasons" and "we are not aware of the limitations of CVS compared to modern DVCS". That's the difference between "sane" engineering conservatism and a "get off my lawn" attitude.
Moreover, that's not what I said. Being able to come into a project and work within its ecosystem is an extremely valuable skill. It's the exact opposite of the mentality that drives NIH syndrome. OpenBSD is an OS written for high security, high stability. They simply don't have time to quibble with the next big VCS thing, especially when they're not having issues with the old one. They know the edge cases with CVS, migrating an entire project and dev team to git or SVN or mercurial or whatever would be way more disruptive than just dealing with those quirks.
Side note: I'd be really interested to see an OpenBSD designed VCS. I'd be very curious what the design would look like.
I don't know. What's wrong with it? I've used it for decades now and it's never really been a problem. Sure, I like git, but the idea that CVS is some kind of show-stopper just never resonated with me.
CVS is frankly hideous. Saying "git is way too complicated" is another way of saying "CVS is way underpowered". However, a good reason to cling to this relic of a bygone age is that, as far as I know, they have everything in CVS, and it must be a lot more convenient to be able to checkout an arbitrary part of their dev tree than messing around with git submodules.
That said, if their attitude is really "if you complain about CVS, you are not worthy", that is bound to turn off many people, and for good reason.