Sebastian's WebLog

VSS, under duress. I've used Perforce, CVS, and Subversion. (If you are interested in CVS, take a look at Subversion - it's meant to be a CVS replacement.)

I'm most fond of Perforce. Take a look, you'll probably like it.

Peforce. Atomic changelists, merge seperated from checkin, highly scaleable... We changed from VS and never looked back.

By corporate standard, at work, I'm required to use StarTeam. I used to say that Perforce was my favorite alternative, but since I've installed SourceGear Vault, I have to say I'm liking that better... mostly, because it's so much easier to relate the concepts to my VSS/StarTeam-using colleagues.

I've switched from VSS to Vault and I really don't see myself going back to VSS unless forced.

One year ago that same day:
http://www.nidaros.homedns.org/weblog/archives/000017.html

Subversion for some projects now. It's very very good. (and free). For the rest sourcesafe still...

MS will release a souped up VSS with whidbey, but I doubt it will be anything groundbreaking. (read: it will have just new screens).

Fabrice, that's quite a coincidence, and an utterly impressive discovery by you :-)

Shortly after posting that entry, I started building an SCC provider for Subversion. Never finished it, though.

In addition to those mentioned, arch looks ideal, except for the fact that it doesn't run natively on Windows. Until it does, Subversion is a good choice.

Been using Subversion for about a month and a half. Before that was nothing. (Weekly manual backups and people all working in the same folder, stepping on each others toes.) Had used VSS about a year ago while on site at a client and *hated* it. I was going to try Vault but then I came across Subversion.

Subversion is great: fast, intuitive, well documented, and free. The TortoiseSVN Windows Explorer add-on makes it so easy any monkey in a pair of khakis can use it. It was designed to be a CVS killer but in my opinion it will end up being much more than that. The only thing it lacks right now is tight VS.NET integration. There's AnkhSVN but I would consider that app to be more in an alpha/beta stage.

The ONE issue with Subversion and VS.NET is that for whatever reason VS.NET doesn't work right when working on web projects (something with Frontpage Extensions?) when the folder has any folders that are named starting with a "." Its a minor annoyance that can be worked around with maybe 15 minutes of tweaking VS and your project file, but worth mentioning nonetheless. Boy it sure would be nice if the Subversion client had a setting in its config file to pick the name of its ".svn" folder. It's an open source project; perhaps someone more ambitious than myself will add this funcitonality.

So if you're looking for a vcs that integrates well w/ VS.NET and you're willing to shell out $200 bucks a head, Vault is probably your best bet. If you'd rather go free, Subversion is the way to go.

I have been using cvs (http://www.cvsnt.org) with TortoiseCvs(http://www.tortoisecvs.org) for almost a year now and love it. It is great to be able to have multiple developers working on the same file and the same time and have the changes merged in.

Before CVS I used VSS but absolutely hated it. It was very restrictive in a multiple developer project environment. We were always having to wait from someone to check in their changes before we could make our changes even though we were not changing the same lines of code.

Justin - I'm not trying to convince you to use VSS again since I don't like it either, but it does allow you to do "shared checkouts" where you wouldn't have to wait for others to check in files. Without that restriction, and assuming everyone is at the same physical location, VSS isn't that bad.

SourceSafe complaints centered around exclusive checkout are invalid, since that option has been around in SourceSafe for many years now.

Oh, I use VSS, CVS, and CVSNT regularly. I also use Vault ocassionally and am checking out Subversion on a test project, and I'm pretty darn impressed so far.

Subversion rocks. We killed VSS here, are strictly Subversion now, and haven't looked back. Forget about the darn VS.NET integration, you don't need it with Subversion, because the whole model is ten times better.

PS: There is an easy way to fix that web projects issue with subversion. Check my blog post about subversion for the link to the article on fixing web project support in VS.NET.

Subversion has great features and works very well. Setting it up is by no means trivial. First you must install Apache and get mod_dav_svn installed. (All this is manual). The win32 readme acknowledges the fact that some users (lucky me) experience problems with the apache integration (yes, I got it to work). Mind you a kick-ass product like apache doesn't include a great GUI admin tool. Who the hell wants to muck around in config files no matter how easy they are to work with? Basically all Subversion needs is easier deployment so you don't half to waste even a fraction of a second worrying about these things and can get right back to keeping your source code safe. My point is that lot's of folks are so enamored of Subversion that they don't talk about any of these issue. VSS sucks, but let's spread the criticism evenly, ok?

SourceGear Vault...

Thanks a lot for all your comments!

This is the brief review I did of version control systems:

http://william.bartholomew.com.au/DotBlog/archive/2004/02/16/196.aspx

Anybody have updated input on this thread?   We use mostly P4 and clearCase here.   I used CVS a few years back, and VSS quite a bit.  After 20 years of developing, I am switching to a management role and have to make a recommendation to lots of groups.  I don't want to be another "management jexk" who force bad decisions down people's throats.  To save cost long term, I am leaning towards subversion, but if P4 is really that much better, its worth it.