I know from my own experience—when you want to start a project that has been done before you, it's easy to fall into the trap of faultily rationalizing why none of the other attempts have worked and why you're going to do it better.
However, I don't think you should ever avoid writing something you'd enjoy for the sole reason that there are prior attempts (successful or unsuccessful). If you aren't motivated by money, you won't lose anything if your project doesn't get a single user, but you will always gain enlightenment and great experience.
I understand your comment and support it -- I have, many times, thought of implementing a POSIX userland in Go, but the task has daunted me, so that has not been realised till now. What bothered me was the fact that they show usage of CVS as an alert for deprecation. I concur your argument though, no-one can judge no-one else for what they choose the create in their own time. But CVS is perfectly usable software (and I am telling this as someone who has spent a month trying to CVS-checkout OpenBSD source tree, only because $CVS_RSH=rsh rather than ssh).
> What bothered me was the fact that they show usage of CVS as an alert for deprecation.
CVS still works just as well as it ever did, but it is super crusty at this point. If an open source project hasn't transitioned off of it, that's a sign to me that the maintainer either doesn't know any modern DVCSes, or doesn't care about the project enough to transition to them.
It's not a guarantee that the project is dead or outdated, but it's a smell.
Of course, I consider still being hosted on Sourceforge to also be a smell.
> CVS still works just as well as it ever did, but it is super crusty at this point. If an open source project hasn't transitioned off of it, that's a sign to me that the maintainer either doesn't know any modern DVCSes, or doesn't care about the project enough to transition to them.
I agree with you completely. CVS is old, but that doesn't make it bad per se. If it could serve the needs of source control before, I doubt the needs have changed that much to require a different SCM tool. We just see new solutions that work better so we naturally migrate to them.
My point is that the argument for CVS is probably just a forced, faulty rationalization by the author so he/she can justify writing a new implementation. But I'm repeating again that there is nothing wrong in reimplementing something just for the sake of it—you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain :)
However, I don't think you should ever avoid writing something you'd enjoy for the sole reason that there are prior attempts (successful or unsuccessful). If you aren't motivated by money, you won't lose anything if your project doesn't get a single user, but you will always gain enlightenment and great experience.