niallo

niallo: cvs as a software genre

2007-08-07T23:39:13.0007Z

I think software ought not to be typed as protocol, communication spec perhaps? I posted something to that end here.

niallo: cvs as a software genre

2007-08-07T23:11:15.0032Z

CVS seems different to me from Vi because it could be seen as a network protocol and a file format. I think that the software implementation mentioned in the Wikipedia article is more correctly referred to as "GNU CVS". There are other implementations of CVS such as OpenCVS or CVSNT. In fact, I believe that the original "CVS" was a shell script front-end to RCS tools, and quite different from the GNU version.

Perhaps 'Software Genre' is not the correct type to describe CVS as a network protocol, file format and software program though - I'd be interested in other perspectives here.

niallo: cvs as a software genre

2007-08-04T13:04:14.0011Z

You marked cvs to be a software genre. It seems to me that it is also an implementation of the software, and that this is what the wikipedia article talks about. I realize that there are other implementations out there, and I have run into similar problems for vi, but loads of programs, especially on unix, are near copies of one another. Should these reference implementations be of type software genre and software, and belong to their own type? This can be generalized outside software too. I don't know if this is possible, but this is what seems to make most sense to me.