SourceSafe to PVCS Migration

Our small .NET Development team is currently using Visual SourceSafe as the SCM of choice, but the rest of my company uses PVCS.  I have installed PVCS 7.5 on my test machine with a view to migrate our SourceSafe installation to PVCS. So far, my efforts have been in vain.  Opening projects from PVCS has basically resulted in locking my machine up.  Adding projects to PVCS from Visual Studio has resulted in a crashed IDE. When I attempted to modify the project bindings in Visual Studio, the Visual Studio bindings editor showed that I had established a valid connection, but on closing the editor I got an "unspecified error."  I haven't had any of these difficulties with PVCS.

I tried using the vss2pvcs.exe utility provided with PVCS, but it failed to copy all of my files, and some of the ones it did copy I'm not able to retrieve to my disk.  So that ended up being a blind alley.

My company places a high value on everyone using the same source control repository, so I've really been trying to make this work  I've already burned a week on this.  Is anyone else using PVCS 7.5 with Visual Studio? Has anyone else had to migrate from SourceSafe to PVCS?  What pitfalls did you come across? How did you get around them?

I'll be posting your answers to these questions on this blog.

Published Friday, December 17, 2004 2:35 PM by taganov
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Comments

# re: SourceSafe to PVCS Migration

Friday, December 17, 2004 3:47 PM by Chris

I had problems with PVCS changing the source control provider. The symtoms were that VS2003 would lock up anytime we tried to access VSS. New installations of VSS would not correct the issue. There is a registry key that we had to manually edit to make VS think it was no longer connected to PVCS.

I know this probably does not solve your problem, however it may indicate that there is some incompatibility having VSS and PVCS installed on the same machine. I would try removing both, cleaning up the registry, and installing only PVCS to see if that works any better.

# re: SourceSafe to PVCS Migration

Friday, December 17, 2004 5:12 PM by Kris Gray

I'm using Version 8.0 of the PVCS (Now Merant, Now whoever) client, so I can't really contribute to much to your particular problem.

But the two working side by side do work.

Were using this utility here for vss integration
http://www.codeproject.com/tools/sccswitcher.asp

And to do the migration we just checked everything out of vss and added it to PVCS. Not ideal but we wanted to re-arrange some stuff before hand anyway.

GL.

# re: SourceSafe to PVCS Migration

Saturday, December 18, 2004 8:16 AM by Jay Glynn

Forget about importing the projects. Part of the problem lies with SourceSafe and part lies with VM. Unless it is a very small project and that you have absolutely no errors (rarely a true staement)in the SourceSafe database it just will not work. I'm in the process of doing the same as you and what I do is take a latest version of a project from SourceSafe and start a new VM project with it. Maintain the SourceSafe archives for history but everything from this point forward is in VM. Another advantage to this is that occasionaly you will find that a change in folder structure can benefit the project. This is the time to do that. Also don't even bother with ide integration. You are much better off to use VM ide to check in and out. Doing things like branching and merging is almost impossible if you try and do them in Studio.

BTW upgrade to version 8 as soon as you can. Stability much improved and speed much improved. We have the server set up which improves security. The only person that can actually see the project databases directly is me. Developers interact with VM server. You don't have to bother with folder access rights at all. Mucho better....

Be glad to help out with questions if you have any at jlsglynn at gmail.com

Good luck

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