Strategic Issues facing CVS

This is our attempt to list some of the big, important issues facing CVS. Of course, any such list is subjective, and this one may not even reflect exactly what we find most important, but it should give some idea.

• Graphical user interfaces (there is activity with MacCVS Pro, MacCVS/WinCVS, and others, so I'm not sure when to declare this problem "solved" whatever that means).
• No way to add other text formats (user-supplied diff/merge programs for formats like GIF, WordPerfect, &c).
• Doesn't scale well to many-file repositories (separated metadata). Some of our feedback from customer sites indicates little concern about this; presumably this is an issue at the biggest and busiest sites only.
• Multisite
• Change control (ability to treat changes to several files as part of one entity that can be manipulated as a single entity) (customer feedback indicates that people do wish for this).
• Build management system (ability to share derived files between different users). Some customers seem to want this, but for the most part seem willing to adapt to having each user have their own derived files.
• Documentation (customer feedback confirms).
• Ease of installation and getting started. Best illustrated by the sentence in Practical: "Remember that CVS is not for the faint of heart; you need to be willing to deal with its technical complexities in order to get its additional power". All too true; it needs to change. The RCS library and other changes in CVS 1.10 help some...
• Joins are way too confusing: (1) needs to remember what it has already joined from a branch (#39 in TODO, here are more thoughts), (2) better documentation.