Re: some questions

[fheitka attglobal net]

In <20000507172551.F2244@aloss.ukuu.org.uk>, on 05/07/00 
   at 05:25 PM, Telsa Gwynne <hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk> said:

>On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 10:56:58AM -0400 or thereabouts,
>fheitka@attglobal.net wrote: > I have two questions.  First one is about
>gnome on CVS.
>> The second question is about some CVS behaviour.

>Okay. Sort of. Modules in CVS tend to have two "branches". There is the
>HEAD branch (always in capitals) which is where most of the development
>(and breaking things) happens. And there is the stable branch, which gets
>bug-fixes and so on, and when something from the head branch works
>_properly_, that gets merged into the stable branch.

OK if I wanted to checkout the latest stable version of gnome-libs via CVS
what command would I type?  i.e cvs -z3 co GNOME-LIBS (?)

>When you check out a module from CVS, by default you get the HEAD branch,
>because CVS is a tool for developers rather than for end-users. To get
>the stable branch, you have to specify that you want it when you issue
>the command.

>gnome-libs is currently a wonderful example of this.

>If you were to check out gnome-libs at the moment, you would look at the
>contents, and if you have any sense, you'll look look at the
>configuration scripts, which say very early on,
>	if test -z "$CERTIFIED_GNOMIE"; then
>	cat $srcdir/message-of-doom
>	exit 1
>	fi

>message-of-doom is a big warning message, and it says very bluntly, "This
>is not stable. It probably won't compile. If it compiles, it probably
>won't work. If it works, it will break your apps. You should be using the

Yep.  I've got the message of doom, but not on all apps.  Some apps seem
to be either the stable apps themselves or an abandoned developer app
because, some of them appear older than the stable sources that you can
download via ftp.

I like the idea of CVS.   I like to keep my system updated with the latest
sources for many apps and it's easier to update via CVS than to use
patches or download entire source tarballs.  The thing I wonder about is
whether I'm getting the latest sources based on one example.  Not with
gnome though.  The example is with the new kernel NFS.  The  folks working
on that seemed to have abandoned the CVS tree and are mailing patches
around the old fashioned way. 

>On your copy? It means that someone has removed the file from the main
>repository. I think :) 

Does that mean the file  is still in my copy?  Does CVS delete it, or
should I do it manually?

Thanks for sharing your insight.

Fred