All of these reasons boil down to "if it ain't broke" and "that's what we're used to".
Switching VCS for a project of this size is always complicated and OpenBSD devs are famously "old school" and conservative with their software choices.
I used to use CVS before switching to SVN and later DCVS like Mercurial and Git. The claim that "it is unlikely that any alternative versioning system would improve the developer's productivity or quality" is absolutely laughable IMO.
This is especially true nowadays where CVS support in modern tooling, if it even exists, is usually legacy and poorly maintained.
> All of these reasons boil down to "if it ain't broke" and "that's what we're used to".
"Works for us". Which is a pretty good argument.
> The claim that "it is unlikely that any alternative versioning system would improve the developer's productivity or quality" is absolutely laughable IMO.
Why is it laughable exactly? I mean for me I can't use CVS due to the lack of atomic directory checkins, but if they don't need them or they have already a system in place which may even better tie with their development/release style than any generic VCS could, why bother?
> This is especially true nowadays where CVS support in modern tooling, if it even exists, is usually legacy and poorly maintained.
The explanation all makes sense. But the key line of “we all know cvs” is effectively exclusionary to all the other developers in the world who don’t use cvs. At some point they will need new talent which will be harder to get.
If you know git or any other version control then using CVS really isn't that hard; many commands are similar.
And everything is exclusionary to someone. Pure git email workflow? Exclusionary to people who find it hard/difficult, or use email in a different way (e.g. only gmail web UI). GitHub Pull Request workflow? Exclusionary to people who don't want to run non-free JS, or don't want to use "Micro$oft GitHub", or don't like using web interfaces.
Accusing on of the first pioneers of Open Source as being "exclusionary" has got to be a joke.
In many ways, they were there first.
I really don't understand why there's such a tendency to demand "monolithic social networks" even in open source software development. Connecting to people is great when feelings are mutual, but we don't even have a right to be left alone without being accused of being anti-social?
Based on that rationale, anyone using Typescript is being exclusionary to developers who don't know Typescript.
They picked a system that suits the projects work flow, is well documented and a relatively low learning curve for anyone interested. I doubt cvs would be the main turnoff for someone looking to be an OpenBSD developer.
That argument would be more analogous if you picked say CoffeeScript. The point is it’s something that used to be reasonably popular but for reasons the vast majority of the world has moved on from.
CVS isn't "hard to learn", devs worthy enough to make meaningful contributions to OpenBSD can probably make sense of it in less than a day. It's just... extremely anti-ergonomic given the other options we have today.
It's a fairly small project and doesn't have too many costs, relatively speaking.
Previously the main income was from selling CD sets (they intentionally limited the web download options), but they stopped doing that about 15 years ago orso.
