Moving to CVS from VSS
Don Browing comments on using Subversion or CVS in place of VSS. Peter Provost started a lengthy discussion in the Win Tech: Off Topic list on Moving to CVS from VSS; great tips for those wanting to make the switch to CVS. As you'll see in this discussion, Brad Wilson is always a great source of information for using CVS in the context of .NET, and just CVS in general. Methinks he should aggregate all these tips/ideas into a book. I've been happily using CVS for quite a while now thanks to the productive TortoiseCVS, but based on Don's recommendation I'll be looking at Subversion as well.
I guess I will throw my 2 cents into this topic. I find VSS completely unacceptable mainly for 2 reasons: (1) Branching and merging is horrible (2) Accessing the repository remotely is horrible. Therefore, I have been using CVS over the last year or so and I try to get any one I work for to adopt it as well. CVS certainly has it's short-comings (namely complexity of getting SSH setup and renaming), but it is by far much better than VSS. I have also recently been experimenting with Subversion, but I am just a little scared of it. In CVS, everything is stored in text format and, when I've had any problems, I've been able to fix them myself by looking at the files and figuring out what was wrong. In Subversion, the repository is stored in a Berkley DB database. There have been a couple reports of people loosing their data and maybe these people just didn't know what they were doing, but it still scares me. I absolutely love the way that Subversion is implemented as a WebDAV extension and that it relies on a web server (Apache) as it's main communication engine and for security. I hope that they will consider releasing an ISAPI filter to make Subversion work with IIS some day. It would also be nice if the data was stored in a more robust database like SQL Server, but I realize this one will never happen. In the end, I am just a little too nervous to make the move just yet. Hopefully someone will reply to my post and help to address my concerns because I really do think that Subversion is a very promising alternative and will continue to get better and better in the future.