How so? CVS do make branching and merging rather annoying, but I don't see how reviewing changes becomes difficult. It's a lot easier to track the changes to the entire OpenBSD source three, compared to the Linux kernel.
Git and Mercurial are extremely nice tools, but the flow of patches and branches quickly become rather hard to follow. CVS doesn't have most of the features that newer tools have, so there's stuff you simply can't do, but it is extremely easy to follow the code.
There's many problems that makes it very annoying to review their changes:
- CVS commits are per file. You can't see changes made by a single commit to multiple files.
- CVS cannot rename files. You have to create a new file and remove the old one. So you cannot follow history of the changes.
- CVS is really slow. You cannot clone the repository locally, so it takes a few seconds to show any change, whereas git shows you any commit and logs instantly. And you can't do it offline (for instance if you need to spend a few hours in a train).
- git log / show / diff is so much better than cvs log / diff.
- you can't use things like git blame
- they've lost all openssl.org history. If they were using git, they could have cloned the openssl git repository, and add their commits on top, keeping all history (which is often very useful when you're trying to understand why something has been done like this, or who introduced some change).
I'm not an openssl expert, so I didn't plan to review their changes anyway. But if I had to, using CVS would be the most annoying thing.
> I'm not an openssl expert, so I didn't plan to review their changes anyway
Bad excuse. Now if you said you don't know C at all, that'd be reasonable.
> But if I had to, using CVS would be the most annoying thing.
There's freshbsd, cgit on anoncvs, probably a git repo or two on github. You don't need to touch CVS to view the code and diffs. Blaming the VCS that much is a bunch of lazy excuses. Yes, CVS has its shortcomings. No it doesn't make code review difficult.
Git and Mercurial are extremely nice tools, but the flow of patches and branches quickly become rather hard to follow. CVS doesn't have most of the features that newer tools have, so there's stuff you simply can't do, but it is extremely easy to follow the code.