🚀 go-pugleaf

While my subject line is somewhat negative, I must first take the
opportunity to thank and congratulate the Borland JBuilder team for
creating such a great piece of software.  Rarely does an application
impress me, and even more rarely does one actually excite me enough
to start showing it off and bragging to my peers.  "Look how great this
is!", I say.  And I mean it....JB4 is that good.

JB4 Foundation had that effect on me, and it was with that enthusiasm
that I pushed hard to get JB4 Enterprise so I could meld with our huge
CVS repository here at work.  CVS is a big part of our environment, and
it has been in use for two years now.  We have a large source
repository, and a fairly large team of developers now using it
successfully.

I installed JB4 Enterprise and pointed my existing JB4 .jpr projects at
their appropriate modules on the CVS server.  Immediately, I was
impressed with the History tab CVS integration.  This is how an IDE
should be!  Also, it seems the commit process is well-thought out, as
much as I can surmise from the online help.

But after attempting to use JB4 Enterprise's CVS integration, I am left
with a somewhat less-than-enthused reaction.  Actually, the CVS Team
integration is almost unusable for my company in its current state.  We
have enabled a watch on the root of our CVS tree, and as a result most
(if not all) of our source code when checked out is made readonly on the
file system. In fact, when checking out a module within JB4 Enterprise,
the source is actually readonly, too.  JB4 Enterprise doesn't allow us
to edit the source whatsoever.

This creates a serious usability problem for us.  Not only can we not
modify our files within JB4 Enterprise, we cannot rectify the problem
either with any context menu for CVS, nor the file menu.  For the past
two years, I have been using Microsoft's Visual J++, and while it
doesn't have the great history and commit support JB4 Enterprise has, I
can at least tell J++ to turn a file non-readonly so I can edit it.  I
cannot do that within JB4 Enterprise.

I can see several things that would be easy for Borland to implement
that would help this situation:

   1.  Seamlessly allow editing a readonly file that has a CVS entry to
       back it on the server.

   or

   2.  Supply a "make read/write" command on the file menu....and allow
       a shortcut key to be assigned to it.

   or

   3.  Add "CVS Edit" and "CVS Unedit" on the cvs menu for a file. A
       nice-to-have would be to make those CVS commands available on the
       editor pane.  A really-nice-to-have would be to allow those
       commands to have a shortcut key assignment.

There you have it.  The simple provision for editing watched source is
not in place, and it kills the CVS integration for us.  I would love to
be wrong about this, so if anyone can point out what I might be missing,
I would greatly appreciate it.

________________________________________________________________________
  Kurt Westerfeld