Here's an explanation: https://cvs.afresh1.com/~andrew/o/why-cvs.html
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.
"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.
You make that sound as a disadvantage...
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.
Maybe well documented, but "suits the project flow" and "low learning curve", absolutely not
(I mean, ok, maybe "low learning curve" if you're developing a very simple UNIX project in the 90s)
CVS is one of the tools where I literally never look back and say "ok this was nice". SVN and Mercurial something here and there. CVS? Never
There is reason Perforce, as crap as it is, is still as popular as it is.
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?
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.
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.