Subject: Re: Cygnus Win32 B17.1: Port of Cyclic Software CVS 1.9
From: [email-masked] (Jim Kingdon)

1 Mar 1997 00:30:52 -0800
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
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	<c=US%a=_%p=TELXON%l=TELXON/TLXUSEX1/[email-masked]>
	([email-masked])
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First of all, let me thank you for being willing to work on CVS, and
for the effort that you have put into things like being willing to run
the "CVS sanity" tests.  Even if the patches are not yet ready for
inclusion in the main CVS source base, they can still be distributed
elsewhere.  That doesn't imply that the patches are "wrong" or "bad"
or that your efforts are unappreciated.  I do think that making it
possible for CVS to build with Cygwin is A Good Thing (TM).

As for your comments about Cyclic, if this is going to continue to be
a matter of arguments and flames, I'd rather stop now.  But perhaps I
can point you in the direction of some resources that you perhaps were
not aware of, and clarify a few issues:

> Your email address indicates you work at Cyclic Software, supposedly the
> maintainers of CVS.

Cyclic are not the only maintainers of CVS.  CVS is maintained by a
group of people only some of which work at Cyclic.  I know that some
of them read bug-cvs.  If someone else (even someone else at Cyclic,
although I am the only full-time person at the moment), wants to look
at the patches in question, I say *GREAT*!  It wouldn't even have to
be one of the maintainers, if someone wanted to take the patches and
work on packaging them up as described in the HACKING file.

> Perhaps it is because Cyclic Software has already found out about and
> fixed those bugs internally

We don't have any internal code base distinct from what you see in the
nightly snapshots on ftp.cyclic.com.  In addition to the snapshots,
you might be interested in the commit-cvs mailing list (see HACKING
from a snapshot of newer than 4 Feb 97).

> Perhaps it is because with a reliable piece of software, there will be
> less of an incentive for people to purchase a maintenance contract
> from Cyclic

I don't know of any way to prove or disprove that notion, but I will
offer my opinion: if we did that, then we might lock ourselves into a
large share of a tiny market, but we would insure that CVS remains a
bit player.  I'd rather have a smaller slice of a large and growing
CVS pie.

I also assure you that the reasoning behind requirements like needing
to separate unrelated patches into separate submissions (as described
in HACKING) _IS_ the desire to make CVS as reliable as possible.

> Perhaps some of the bugs have been fixed through contributions on a
> mailing list, but I have been unable to find an archive of the CVS
> mailing list.

There are some archives of info-cvs at
http://tongue1.itc.nrcs.usda.gov/ (the page calls it "cvs-info").  I'm
not sure I've seen any bug-cvs archives.  Perhaps some volunteer would
be interested in archiving bug-cvs and making that archive available.

I hope you understand that Cyclic is a very small company with very
limited resources (see the annual report on our web site for details),
which necessarily must be focused most strongly on what our customers
are asking us for.  We do try to do things which benefit non-customers
as feasible, but we can only do so much.  We have tried very hard to,
as much as possible, set up CVS maintenance so that this does not
result in us being a bottleneck.

> Ah, [NT tkCVS] port just showed up on 2/17/97 (since I was last on
> the Cyclic site).  Thank you for the information.

Hope you find it useful.  I don't know much about it other than what
is on the web site.
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