What do you mean by "manipulating an arch repository"? The repository should not be directly manipulated as we often are forced to do with CVS. It can be manipulated in many ways with the "tla" command, just like the "cvs" command.
Regarding (2): How many of our _developers_ committing code to the OpenACS tree rely exclusively on Windows, without access to a *nix box of some kind? My experience with the community says that it's a very very limited number. Do we even have anyone running OpenACS on Windows?
Sure it would be great if it worked everywhere, but we have to consider if it's worth it to continue to inflict pain on the entire development community because of a very restricted set of developers that we're not even sure exists.
Of course we'd continue to provide things like nightly tar balls, bug-tracker where people can submit patches, etc. Using arch would definitely _not_ isolate users who rely exclusively on Windows.
Re: 3) Very much agreed, and I'm working on it. As far as "best practices" for CVS, what I usually see is a hodge-podge of hacks to work around its defficiencies. But if you're working on a system that doesn't have those defficiencies, many of the "best practices" are not necessary anymore.
-Roberto
