4.  Future Enhancements and Current Bugs

      Since cvs was designed to be incomplete, for reasons of design simplicity, there are naturally a good number of enhancements that can be made to make it more useful. As well, some nuisances exist in the current implementation.

• cvs does not currently ``remember'' who has a checked out a copy of a module. As a result, it is impossible to know who might be working on the same module that you are. A simple-minded database that is updated nightly would likely suffice.
• Signal processing, keyboard interrupt handling in particular, is currently somewhat weak. This is due to the heavy use of the system(3) library function to execute RCS programs like co and ci. It sometimes takes multiple interrupts to make cvs quit. This can be fixed by using a home-grown system() replacement.
• Security of the source repository is currently not dealt with directly. The usual UNIX approach of user-group-other security permissions through the file system is utilized, but nothing else. cvs could likely be a set-group-id executable that checks a protected database to verify user access permissions for particular objects before allowing any operations to affect those objects.
• With every checked-out directory, cvs maintains some administrative files that record the current revision numbers of the checked-out files as well as the location of the respective source repository. cvs does not recover nicely at all if these administrative files are removed.
• The source code for cvs has been tested extensively on Sun-3 and Sun-4 systems, all running SunOS 4.0 or later versions of the operating system. Since the code has not yet been compiled under other platforms, the overall portability of the code is still questionable.
• As witnessed in the previous section, the cvs method for tracking third party vendor source distributions can work quite nicely. However, if the vendor changes the directory structure or the file names within the source distribution, cvs has no way of matching the old release with the new one. It is currently unclear as to how to solve this, though it is certain to happen in practice.