Version Control/Configuration Management/Bug tracking

We started off using SourceSafe which very few of us actually like - the person who made that decision is no longer with the company! About 3 years ago, unhappy with the unreliability of SourceSafe, we started doing some new projects on CVS. At the moment development is split between the two, with products descending from or related to our original product lines in SourceSafe and much newer work in CVS (including all our Unix stuff!). Changing either side over would be painful as many of our procedures are written in terms of using one system or the other and are tailored to the models they support.

SourceSafe with its exclusive checkout model is probably better for a project where there are a lot of small incremenetal changes made by several developers, CVS feels much more natural for ongoing development that's occasionally synchronised between a group of more independent developers.

I can't say I liked SourceSafe at all. The GUI wasn't bad as such things go, but it was tied to Windows machines, it was almost impossible to use from batch files (if you had multiple databases) and it frequently - FAR too frequently - reported that its files weer corrupt. Big share-and-branch operations started off slow and got slower as the filesystem VSS lived on got bigger - I've never seen a system quite as bad as SourceSafe for creating a plethora of small files all over a disc....

pete

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pete@fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB

I use the free (as in beer) Perforce

for all of my personal stuff. For more than one user, you have to buy licenses, but the rates are very reasonable for commercial software. Perforce supports every development platform imaginable. I highly recommend it.

No. I don't work for Perforce, I'm just a *very* satisfied user.

--
Michael N. Moran           (h) 770 516 7918
5009 Old Field Ct.         (c) 678 521 5460
Kennesaw, GA 30144

"... abstractions save us time working, but they don't
  save us time learning."
Joel Spolsky, The Law of Leaky Abstractions

The Beatles were wrong: 1 & 1 & 1 is 1

What are you looking for? In what ways has CS-RCS fallen short?

I use CS-RCS for my own stuff, and it does more than I need. There is also the "Pro" version and CS-CVS is in beta -- I haven't tried either of those, but since you're used to CS-RCS, they might be good options (if you haven't already looked at them).

I used PVCS through most of my career -- from 1987 until 1998 or so. It's always been good, but now seems to have become hideously expensive. Especially support. The price of success, I guess.

Back around 1998, the company I worked for decided to dump PVCS for something new (IIRC, PVCS was asking for about $5000/yr to support about a dozen seats). One of the candidates was MKS Source Integrity. It was my favorite, and I wish we'd gone with it.

Instead they bought Continuus, which is really quite innovative and powerful, but completely different from any other CM tool I've worked with. The user interface is difficult, but if your group has a committment to CM, it's more capable than most I've run across.

I also worked for a short time with Visual SourceSafe, which was perhaps the easiest system to use, but the one that caused the most headache for the CM administrators.

HTH,

-=Dave

--
Change is inevitable, progress is not.

snipped-for-privacy@ornette.freeserve.co.uk (Ted Wood) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

I find the free CVS works fine for just me, a few, or 100's of developers. Get it at sourceforge.

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- Mark ->
--

Some of the comments expressed scare me as we use Visual SourceSafe exclusively. We had some problems prior to version 6, but I haven't seen any problems since. I do have stuff in multiple databases, but our most used projects are in a single database.

I asked MS support about single vs multi databases a while back and they recommended single databases when the total size will be under 5 GB.

Since we have programmers who work off-site, we use Source OffSite from SourceGear. It runs in a true client/server fashion and performs great for remote users. I highly recommend it.

--
Scott
ExoTech R&D, Inc.

I would throw in SubVersion. This is a GNU (I think) licensed version-control system with many improvements over CVS. It's still in beta but usable. It supports atomic checkins, binary files, directories, moves and renames, etc. It has an HTTP base (webdav actually) client-server protocol so it plays nicely with firewalls and proxies, and provides security too if you use the HTTPS transfer protocol. One drawnback I discovered is speed. Still, I kind of like it. The project I use it for is ~1GB in size.

Regrads, Andras Tantos

Hi,

Have you ever tried to get source out of a sourcesafe database that was generated with an earlier version of sourcesafe ? A friend, who uses Sourcesafe at the company he works for, has told me many horror stories of trying to get code out of a configured old sourcesafe database. At least with CVS, if worst comes to worst one can use standard Unix tools to get the source out of a CVS repository.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Mark (and others), Does CVS still need to be client-server (meaning two PC's)? There are some real advantages for a C/S system, but for a sole developer it would be easier to have everything on one PC.

Dennis,

In article , Dennis writes

Most RCS systems (PVCS, sourcsafe, RCS, MKS, etc etc ) will run on a single machine. I have MKS, PVCS and sourcesafe all on one machine. (actually the same machine!)

Regards

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/\ /\/\/ snipped-for-privacy@phaedsys.org

\/\/ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

No --- because it never did.

You obviously won't get the full power of it out of silly platforms, but you can run it quite fine on a single box.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

Wouldn't touch SS with a bargepole. I've had bad experiences with it in the past. There are some areas where you're not compelled by compatibility with everyone else to buy the products of the Evil Empire and this is one of them.

Cheers

TW

I'm not about to risk my company's past and future code and documentation base on something thats "still in beta".

Cheers TW

beta

Remember that different people have different ideas about when code changes from "beta" to "release" - I've seen plenty of commercial software that I wouldn't even give an "alpha" classification. Subversion beta may be far more stable and reliable than certain other version control software for which you pay plenty of money (other posters have complained about certain other commercial version control software - I haven't tried it myself, and don't intend to). But it is worth noting that subversion is being actively developed, and they have made changes that required a dump/restore of the data (although they tell you about it) due to format changes. It's got more features than cvs, but is less mature - take your choice.

From the subversion faq:

Is Subversion stable enough for me to use for my own projects?

We think so! Subversion has small bugs here and there, but in general is reliable enough for real use. If it were any other project, it probably would have been declared "1.0" long ago; but because it's version-control software, we're being extra paranoid about labeling. We believe that Subversion is stable and have confidence in our code, in fact, we've been self-hosting since September of 2001--eating our own caviar so to speak. We declared "alpha" because we're ready for the world to try Subversion. After nearly two years of self-hosting, we haven't lost any data at all.

No -- never did AFAIK.

I've never seen any Unix C/S system that required the server and the client to be on different machines anyway.

--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Is this where people
                                  at               are HOT and NICE and they
                               visi.com            give you TOAST for FREE??

Personally I trust it about as far as I could throw the server it runs on and the rack it's mounted in. ;P

pete

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pete@fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB

And it's impossible (at least on v5, I don't know about 6) to write batch files that use multiple databases.

As for what they 'recommend' - well, sometimes you just can't get around it, it's easier to operate separate databases if you've got separate product lines that used to live on separate servers....

It's academic anyway. I wouldn't ever recommend VSS for serious use.

pete

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pete@fenelon.com "there's no room for enigmas in built-up areas" HMHB

For Windows development platforms, we use PVCS Version Manager & PVCS Tracker for defect reporting. The two work together & there can be associations established between source versions and Tracker issues.

Ken.

+====================================+ I hate junk email. Please direct any genuine email to: kenlee at hotpop.com

I shold have been a little more specific. I've got two projects going and they both require Windows (won't run under *nix) and the server is currently Windows, so as per the CVS site

"Windows 95/NT Discussion:

There are two ways to run CVS on Windows 95/NT. The first is as a client, talking to a CVS server on a Unix box. This is the recommended setup and is commonly used.

The second way is known as "local" or "non-client/server" CVS. This lets you run CVS if you have only Windows machines. However, due to issues (a) with local CVS on Windows, and (b) with the suitability of Windows as a server operating system in general, we would generally recommend this more to try out CVS and get a feel for it rather than for production use."

Dennis,

developer

client

people

they

FREE??

This is just a polite way of saying windows stability is crap, so if you want to be sure your data is safe then you should store it on a *nix box. This is especially true for Win9x machines - lack of protection between processes and lack of file system protection means that any rogue program can smash your cvs database (just like they can smash your emails, the registry, and any other documents - there is nothing special about cvs here). Win9x also apparently has other problems with local services - the NT line is far better for "server-type" programs. Basically, the cvs people feel that if you value your data enough to bother with a cvs system, you shouldn't trust it to windows. But it will run, especially on NT/W2K, and it will give you many advantages over no cvs system.