[prog] VSS to CVS -- looking for experiences and argumentation help

[Rachel McConnell]

I only want to comment on this one thing, since I've not used VSS or 
gone through a transition.

dominik schramm wrote:
> Here's some background information on my questions:
> 1) Some people at my company fear that a giant chaos would break out
>    if concurrent checkouts were allowed. Some even claim that a 
>    considerable amount of time in open source projects using CVS is 
>    spent on resolving conflicts from concurrent commits. Is this true?
> 

An open source project usually has its updates organized by desire - 
that is, I will make changes to a particular file if that's the one I 
want to fix or alter.  This is (or should be!) different from an 
organization's process where tasks are assigned to different programmers 
or teams.  If you've got more than one or two people making significant 
changes to the same file at the same time, you have major process 
problems right there.

An exception to this is configuration files, but those are nearly always 
arranged so that each line has no real relation to the next, and 
conflicts are rare.  Remember (or remind those who need to know it) that 
just because two changes are made to a file, a conflict is not 
inevitable.  CVS can handle quite a bit of concurrent modification 
before it conflicts.

That said, in my very small organization where we do admittedly do a 
certain amount of bugfix by desire, I've never seen a conflict that took 
more than 5 minutes to resolve, and most are far less than that.

Rachel