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Sourcecontrol, VS, CVS and Subversion

I don't really like Visual Source Safe, as a source control system its not bad, but when compared to other systems you see a lack of features thats hard to miss. I have yet to see Team System and the additions to VSS, its also Whidby and in a commerical enviroment there are often other factors that mean an upgrade won't happen for a lengthy peroid of time. So I have started thinking about products that offer features and are available now, two that stand out are CVS and Subversion. Both CVS and Subversion are opensource systems that used throughout commerical and opensource projects.

I started my search with CVS. Direct from source CVS is tricky to run on windows, however a precompiled offering that is geared towards Windows can be found here. A client for Windows is here and Visual Studio is here.

I noticed a list features about CVS that listed some of the limitions and a project called Subversion.

Subversion can be found here, like CVS it supports a wide range of platforms. Like the CVS client you can also use Subversion direct from Windows or from within VSS. A great summary of Subversion can be found here. The Subversion book is well worth a read.

I have decided to trail Subversion to see how well it can be used over VSS, progress here as I make it.
Posted: Nov 05 2004, 08:41 PM by astopford | with 10 comment(s)
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Comments

Brenton House said:

I think you will like Subversion. Let me know if you have any questions.
# November 5, 2004 4:49 PM

Jeff Lewis said:

About three years ago, I convinced our development team to move to CVS from RCS. It has been great except for the time it takes to tag - about 1 hour!

I use and love subversion, but we are in the middle of a long development cycle and just can't switch over right now.
# November 5, 2004 5:07 PM

Christian Romney said:

The only thing I don't like about Subversion/Visual Studio combo is the funky thing that happens with web projects (they don't load properly).
# November 6, 2004 11:14 AM

Brian LeRoux said:

Our team's been using SVN very successfully for some time now. Great for .NET dev.
# November 10, 2004 6:37 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 17, 2004 2:23 PM

Fyodor Sheremetyev said:

Have a look at VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com)! It's lightweight and reliable Subversion plugin for Visual Studio. Uses TortoiseSVN as UI.
# June 21, 2006 3:32 PM

big d said:

We are using SVN for a mid-sized (10K classes/20 developer years wrok, total) commercial project.

I find that it is mediocre on a good day.  Our sysadmin claims some admin tasks are easier, but this comes at the expense of the entire teams' productivity.

The system is quirky, particularly when you use tools like Tortoise, Subversion, Subclipse, etc.  Often the local image metadata gets corrupted and the "cleanup" function cannot straigten it out, requiring everyone on the team to become a subversion expert so they can rebuild their entries file or similar nonsense.

Very few major bugs you can reproduce or point to, but many little things that make it not worthwile. STICK WITH CVS for a couple years, is my advice (as of Nov, 2006).

# November 13, 2006 9:07 AM

Dan said:

Fyodor Sheremetyev - shameless self-plug.  I have come from a cvs background doing C & C++ at uni (yes, that long ago), VSS is a pain to use, Team studio is a hog on your system.  Have used svn for two years now, and it is the way forward.

Subversion is way better than vanilla cvs. Big d - don't know how 20 developers can't get the update-work-commit thing wrong. You only need to clean up when people are stupid and screw things up. it really is quite simple. Always update before starting anything. I have had teams using tortoise built-in, VS pulg-ins, and the only time we had a corrupt repository is when I did something stupid, and my admin was able to sort it out and restore it while we played foozball. Then everyone did an update and merged their changes. beautiful because its simple.

oh, and big d .. i'm big d around here ;)

# February 24, 2007 9:51 AM

ltomlin said:

Well the evidence is clear, Subversion is the clear winner

# July 10, 2007 9:08 PM

Chris said:

I'm a big proponent of CVS. It can run anywhere, and repository administration is little more than creating a directory in a filesystem. Compare that with the overhead of creating a whole MySQL database, which may or may not be possible in your development environment (can you say "Oracle ONLY in THIS shop!"). A vast majority of this things that people purport as advantanges for SVN are only minor annoyances with CVS, and do not, in my opinion, make it a clear winner over CVS. How many people have lost days worth of work (or sleep!) waiting for a 2-minute tag operation to complete?

In my humble opinion, CVS is the clear winner.

# March 31, 2008 5:00 PM
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