Source control
At work, I've been scouting for a new source control product to replace Visual SourceSafe (VSS). Our branch is going to be connecting with another remote office, and VSS can't handle the job.
As a result of Werner Vogels' post on the subject, I've looked at Perforce, StarTeam, CVS, Subversion and Vault. At work, my overriding concern is ease of use. My team still has trouble with VSS sometimes, so I don't need anything more complicated than our current situation.
A quick review of what I've found out so far:
In the meantime, I'm using Subversion on my home machine. I read Ned Batchelder's recent article to get me started, plus I'm using an IDE that has some basic Subversion integration built into it. So far, so good.
As a result of Werner Vogels' post on the subject, I've looked at Perforce, StarTeam, CVS, Subversion and Vault. At work, my overriding concern is ease of use. My team still has trouble with VSS sometimes, so I don't need anything more complicated than our current situation.
A quick review of what I've found out so far:
- Perforce's GUI is bad. Very bad. A definite no.
- StarTeam won't install correctly on Win2003 Server. It depends on a JRE library being installed. Borland recommends Sun's JRE. I tried it -- it created a partial install that wouldn't uninstall correctly either. Frustrated, I gave up and deleted everything manually that I could.
- CVS is command-line stuff, which won't meet the ease-of-use requirement by itself. I've used WinCVS, the Windows front-end to CVS, when I've looked at the Mozilla source code, but I had trouble understanding their interface.
- Subversion also consists of command-line programs. Fortunately, their GUI situation is a little better. Of the two Subversion GUI programs I experimented with, I preferred TortoiseSVN over RapidSVN. TortoiseSVN is integrated with Windows Explorer, and although the interface isn't spectacular, it's better than the spartan RapidSVN GUI.
- Vault looks the most promising since it's the most like SourceSafe. However, we haven't been able to try it yet. Vault uses Microsoft's IIS, and due to security concerns, we can't install IIS on our server. The same concerns don't exist at the remote site, so we may still be able to try it there.
In the meantime, I'm using Subversion on my home machine. I read Ned Batchelder's recent article to get me started, plus I'm using an IDE that has some basic Subversion integration built into it. So far, so good.
posted by Brandon Corfman at
8:23 PM
2 Comments:
We use SourceSafe but with SourceOffSite. You can use it without the web front-end... just using the remote mechanisms. However, while the performance for VPN and WAN clients is much better there seem to be some real issues with "get latest" and checkouts. I've had several developers complain that it doesn't always do a true "get latest" or overwrite old files properly. So ultimately, I don't trust it.
This is why I have said for a long time now, that there is still room for a high-perfomance (but simple) source control product. I think there are a lot of people stuck in the same boat here. They want something simple (not a ton of features they probably won't use), fast (has to work reasonably well over a WAN), and reliable (don't screw up the project).
By
ScW, At
12:04 PM
Hear, hear.
I didn't even bother with SourceOffsite since it merely makes SourceSafe WAN capable without addressing my other concerns. VSS still has the big shortcomings of 2GB archive limits and its non-fault-tolerant database.
By
Brandon Corfman, At
1:18 PM
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