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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Open source Ada OS?
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 05:06:46 -0800 (PST)
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Date: 2011-01-26T05:06:46-08:00
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Yannick Duch=EAne wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Le Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:36:57 +0100, Ludovic Brenta =A0
> <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> a =E9crit:
>> you can backport bug fixes. You cannot do these things with "just" a tar=
ball.
>
> That's more diff (or like) than CVS which helps here.

Wrong. If you do a diff between two releases of GCC (say, 4.4.3 and
4.4.4) the result is literally hundreds of thousands of lines long
(even between minor, bug-fix-only releases), so unusable for a human.
In contrast, if you browse the version control log, you get a summary,
with explanations and bug numbers, of the changes; then you can narrow
your "diff" to the commits that you are interested in.

CVS would not even help do that because CVS, being rubbish, has per-
file histories as opposed to per-project history.

What you say might be true in a few particular cases with severe
restrictions such as SLOC count < 10_000 and developer_count < 5. In
the general case, a proper version control system is, quite simply,
vital.

Note: I do not even bother to create tarballs of the software that I
publish; my version control system does that for me automatically, see
http://www.ada-france.org:8081.

--
Ludovic Brenta.