OT: sourcesafe vs cvs

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cs

I am a long time CVS user, and not at my new job I use sourcesafe with
visual studio. While its nice how they fit together, I am getting really
annoyed at some of the ways sourcesafe does stuff, and granted this is
probably just because I am new to it. So tell me what do you guys use? would
it be too much of a problem if I try to use cvs?
 
I personally use Source Gears Vault. However SCC plugins for cvs and
subversion both exist, although I've not been hugely impressed by them. Just
look around for cvs addins to visual studio and see what you can find. You
could optionally use something like WinCvs and just not bother with
integration.
 
I don't bother with integration (I use StarTeam) and it isn't a problem. I
actually like it better that way. VSS definitely has some odd ideas about
how to do things.

Colin
 
Ugh. Source Safe. Icky.... I use it because it's simple and I could never
get WinCVS to work right, but it's got a LOT of issues. Don't try using any
of the "advanced" features. Check in, check out, that's it. Anything else
and you pretty much endanger your data.

There was a great site up that had a list of problems with Source Safe. It
was an excellent guide in what NOT to do in Source Safe. I can only imagine
the evil empire got to the guy because his site is gone and there's no sign
of it in Google.

BUT, they forgot to cover there tracks. You can get it at the Wayback
machine here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021213145019/www.developsense.com/testing/VSSDefects.html

Enjoy.

Pete
 
cs said:
I am a long time CVS user, and not at my new job I use sourcesafe with
visual studio. While its nice how they fit together, I am getting really
annoyed at some of the ways sourcesafe does stuff, and granted this is
probably just because I am new to it. So tell me what do you guys use? would
it be too much of a problem if I try to use cvs?
Click to expand...

There is also Subversion, which like CVS is free. If remember correctly
it was started by CVS developers who wanted to make something better and
not worry about backwards compatibility.

I think there are a couple of Visual Studio plugins but from what I've
seen the commandline interface is not that bad... imagine that. :-)

Anyway more information can be found at:
http://subversion.tigris.org/
 
yeah I am kinda scared to do stuff on VSS, even moving files scares me. Now
I want to tag our releases so that we can easily go back to them any time we
want, very simple with CVS, still have no clue how to do it in VSS.
 
The problem with CVS is that its almost impossible to setup, install and
configure. There is very poor documentation of the product. I struggled
with it for almost a week before giving up on it. Basically, its an open
source nightmare come true.

VSS is great for small, inhouse projects where teams are not located
geographically different locations.

However, When I used it for a project where our team was split across US
and UK: VSS was a blo*dy pain. One file checkin will take 30 minutes.

We spent extra $ to buy source offsite. But its a lame product. built on
obsolete technology like Microsoft-java, it creates inconsistencies in
the project and corrupts the VSS archive frequently. There were many
complains and every one cribbed continuously. People swore that they
checked in the source code from source offsite... but somehow it never
appeared in the repository. Source Offsite also crashed a lot. I will
not recommend that piece of junk to anyone.

After suffering at the hands of VSS and SourceGear and having absolutely
no support, I feel MS is not serious in their commitment to VSS. I bet,
they don't use it for their own large projects (source code of windows
OS or office etc) [OK I am guessing here ..... but prove me wrong]. They
haven't made any big releases of this product in years with additional
features. only patch work like 6.0a, 6.0c.

So if you have a small project being done by a team which is not split
geographically then go for VSS. If this is not the case, don't even
think about it.

If you intend to use CVS, then hire someone who has actually used it.

There are commercial alternatives which are more stable and mature like
clearcase or starteam but they don't have good integration with VS.Net.

There is no straight forward answer to this question. MS themselves are
confused ... this question was put to them in an MSDN seminar and they
didn't give any straight forward answer. I searched google for an answer
but found many people lurking with the same set of questions and no answers
http://www.nidaros.homedns.org/weblog/archives/000017.html

I hope someone from MS reads this and they write up an little article on
MSDN. I don't expect them to endorse one particular product. But they
should definely tell options and what do they do for their large projects.

regards,
Abhishek.
 
I use TortoiseCVS (www.tortoisecvs.org) which is a front end for CVS.
TortoiseCVS uses Windows Explorer for its user interface, simply by adding
icon overlays and shell extensions to the Windows Explorer. Of all of the
version control systems I've used (SCCS, RCS, CVS, PVCS, SABLIME,
SourceSafe, ClearCASE), TortoiseCVS has by far the best user interface.

There is a similar program called TortoiseSVN (tortoisesvn.tigris.org/)
which is a front end for Subversion.

Regards,
Aaron Queenan.
 
I actually have pretty good experience with CVS as a user and as a server
admin, have installed it on linux, and win2k. My problem is not the
installation or much of the use, but rather the problems I have had in the
past when lets say you add a new file to a project or a new project to a
solution. It was such a pain we ended up including the sln files and csproj
files in cvs, and of course those gaves us some issues.


Abhishek Srivastava said:
The problem with CVS is that its almost impossible to setup, install and
configure. There is very poor documentation of the product. I struggled
with it for almost a week before giving up on it. Basically, its an open
source nightmare come true.

VSS is great for small, inhouse projects where teams are not located
geographically different locations.

However, When I used it for a project where our team was split across US
and UK: VSS was a blo*dy pain. One file checkin will take 30 minutes.

We spent extra $ to buy source offsite. But its a lame product. built on
obsolete technology like Microsoft-java, it creates inconsistencies in
the project and corrupts the VSS archive frequently. There were many
complains and every one cribbed continuously. People swore that they
checked in the source code from source offsite... but somehow it never
appeared in the repository. Source Offsite also crashed a lot. I will
not recommend that piece of junk to anyone.

After suffering at the hands of VSS and SourceGear and having absolutely
no support, I feel MS is not serious in their commitment to VSS. I bet,
they don't use it for their own large projects (source code of windows
OS or office etc) [OK I am guessing here ..... but prove me wrong]. They
haven't made any big releases of this product in years with additional
features. only patch work like 6.0a, 6.0c.

So if you have a small project being done by a team which is not split
geographically then go for VSS. If this is not the case, don't even
think about it.

If you intend to use CVS, then hire someone who has actually used it.

There are commercial alternatives which are more stable and mature like
clearcase or starteam but they don't have good integration with VS.Net.

There is no straight forward answer to this question. MS themselves are
confused ... this question was put to them in an MSDN seminar and they
didn't give any straight forward answer. I searched google for an answer
but found many people lurking with the same set of questions and no answers
http://www.nidaros.homedns.org/weblog/archives/000017.html

I hope someone from MS reads this and they write up an little article on
MSDN. I don't expect them to endorse one particular product. But they
should definely tell options and what do they do for their large projects.

regards,
Abhishek.
I am a long time CVS user, and not at my new job I use sourcesafe with
visual studio. While its nice how they fit together, I am getting really
annoyed at some of the ways sourcesafe does stuff, and granted this is
probably just because I am new to it. So tell me what do you guys use? would
it be too much of a problem if I try to use cvs?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Abhishek Srivastava said:
The problem with CVS is that its almost impossible to setup, install and
configure. There is very poor documentation of the product. I struggled
with it for almost a week before giving up on it. Basically, its an open
source nightmare come true.

VSS is great for small, inhouse projects where teams are not located
geographically different locations.

However, When I used it for a project where our team was split across US
and UK: VSS was a blo*dy pain. One file checkin will take 30 minutes.

We spent extra $ to buy source offsite. But its a lame product. built on
obsolete technology like Microsoft-java, it creates inconsistencies in
the project and corrupts the VSS archive frequently. There were many
complains and every one cribbed continuously. People swore that they
checked in the source code from source offsite... but somehow it never
appeared in the repository. Source Offsite also crashed a lot. I will
not recommend that piece of junk to anyone.

After suffering at the hands of VSS and SourceGear and having absolutely
no support, I feel MS is not serious in their commitment to VSS. I bet,
they don't use it for their own large projects (source code of windows
OS or office etc) [OK I am guessing here ..... but prove me wrong]. They
haven't made any big releases of this product in years with additional
features. only patch work like 6.0a, 6.0c.
Click to expand...

MS uses a program called Source Depot for its windows product atleast, IIRC.
They bought a source license some many years ago(perhaps before VSS existed)
to replace the homegrown system used when nt3.11 was written. It was brought
up in a chat recently(wth the C# team I think), someone asked if Microsoft
ever planned on providing a version of Source Depot, but the response was
that the respondent did not believe they had redistribution rights. So, its
VSS or nothing, however there has been some talk about doing some work on
it. I think it would be a premier place for MS to provide a fully .NETified
developer product, although they may not want to directly compete with
Source Gear.
Source Gear's recent Vault is a pretty decent and well integrated solution.
I havn't tested it across large sets of people(just 4 currently, although it
is cross US and Canada), but it does the job and is atleast worth
demoing(considerably better than the demo I played iwth of Source Offsite
anyway). Vault is written in C# and is the first I know of to use .NET, so
its certainly not obsolete this time. We can only hope MS will provide a
better baseline product, or the OSS community provides something simpler to
work with than SVN or CVS(Embaressing as it is, I couldn't get either
running, which is why I finally decided to go with Vault, anyone who can run
an installer can get the system up and running, no need for specialists).
 
whelp there goes the link...

oh damn just came up... i figured since the link *was* posted on evil
empire's newsgroup that it would disappear too...

hmmm maybe not so evil after all... ;-)
 
I can't get Tortoise to work with most external CVS repositories. It always
says the operation failed. I've seen no options or logs that could help me
with the problem.

[]'s,
Harkos
 
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