Re: [stellation-res] Urgent! Do Not Use Stellation CVS RepositoryUntil

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 14:50, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Stellation-res" <stellation-res@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 12:36 PM
> Subject: Re: [stellation-res] Urgent! Do Not Use Stellation CVS
> RepositoryUntil Further Notice!
> 
> 
> > On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 12:21, Marco Qualizza wrote:
> > > I'll try this again, since I forgot to fix my email for this mailing
> list:
> > >
> > > what does ./CVSROOT/history say?
> >
> > Nothing of any value. (Seriously, nothing there but two lines of
> > configuration strings.)
> >
> > Sorry to say it, but Jim, it really looks like you did it. I logged
> > in to dev.eclipse.org, and looked at the repository files. The deleted
> > files are all changed by you, at 4:27pm yesterday.
> >
> > -Mark
> >
> Maybe this should be an object lesson for us all. Say after me, "delete does
> not mean delete in an SCM system". Delete should mean "make unavailable for
> normal use" but should never mean "physically purge".
> 
> We should provide an archive facility to clean out obsolete stuff from a
> repository.

Well, the reason that we were able to recover so easily is because
delete very fortunately doesn't mean delete in CVS - it means "move into
a place where you won't see it unless you go looking." 

In Stellation, it would have been even easier to fix. (To fix in CVS,
we had to do some work to identify the last checked in version, and
to verify that the restored results correctly matched in. In
Stellation, we could have figured out who did it, how they did
it, and easily grabbed the last version with full confidence that it
was correct.

For archiving: that is one major feature missing from Stellation. In
ClearCase, there are administrative tools for pruning out out-of-date
branches and reclaiming their storage. We don't have anything like
that. It would be a pretty significant piece of work to add.

	-Mark


-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
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