Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Programming IT Technology

Alternative to SourceSafe in a Commercial Environment? 102

Posted by Cliff from the changing-your-revision-control-software dept.
Jim the Bad asks: "After Visual SourceSafe inexplicably corrupted itself one time too many, my Boss has asked me to evaluate the alternatives. This site lists some alternatives, and SourceForge is a commercial product that might suit. Are there any more? It must be rock solid, run on Windows and it must be possible to migrate existing SourceSafe databases. Developer Studio integration is also very desirable. What product would you recommend?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Alternative to SourceSafe in a Commercial Environment? More

Alternative to SourceSafe in a Commercial Environment?

Comments Filter:

  • A coupla things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Sunday April 20, 2003 @05:48AM (#5768098) Homepage
    First, VSS is a crap version control system (if only because it's not client/server), but it doesn't corrupt itself randomly. You need to keep your database sizes to under 1GB or so, run ANALYZE on the thing at least every week (or more, depending on the activity) and generally keep binaries (especially large ones) off of it. Just because the thing has a pretty GUI doesn't mean it also takes care of itself. And of course, backup your database(s) often.

    Your Visual Studio integration requirement is a doozy. I haven't seen anything that works as well as VSS, but then again, another recommendation is to stay away from that anyway. Always use the Explorer or the command line tools.

    Finally, the alternatives. Well, there's the Very Expensive ones which I won't list because you probably know them anyway and, well, they're hideoulsy expensive.

    Then there's CVS. An el-cheapo box running Linux or BSD with decent HDD space, and WinCVS or TortoiseCVS can't be beat. I've successfully migrated some development teams to this setup (along with Bugzilla) and while there's a learning curve, it's certainly much better. Plus, developers can work from home seamlessly, which is generally not the case with VSS. There are lots of tools and help out there for CVS. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed. Plus, it's cheap!

    • Re:A coupla things (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Finally, the alternatives. Well, there's the Very Expensive ones which I won't list because you probably know them anyway and, well, they're hideoulsy expensive.

      What you actually mean is that you don't know what the expensive alternatives are. There's no shame in admitting you don't know something; try it some day.

      If he's looking for good version control then CVS bites big donkey dick. But it's free. That's its only saving grace. Won't be disappointed, my ass. CVS is non-stop disappointment.

      In ter

      • If he's looking for good version control then CVS bites big donkey dick.

        Okay, I agree that CVS isn't perfect, but it certainly doesn't "bite big donkey dick". It's fairly straightforward, it's used by many, many folks out there, and there's good integration with lots of *other* development tools.

        Frankly, I think that most of the people saying that CVS "sucks" read about how someone else found it lacking, and love having something to sound bitch about. Most people that have used CVS have probably run i
        • CVS is tolerable when you just need a place to store your files while retaining a history of changes. However, if your needs go beyond that, its shortcomings become painfully obvious.

          For example, its branching "support" requires you to manually keep track (with tags) of when you branched, so that you have a chance in hell of being able to re-integrate later. Don't even think about just integrating individual changes, either; not only will you not be able to reasonably tag the base for the next integratio

          • CVS is tolerable when you just need a place to store your files while retaining a history of changes.

            CVS may be the worst version control software in wide use. However using CVS vs. using no version control system is akin to flying in an airplane vs. being in free fall at 30,000 feet with no parachute.

            • CVS may be the worst version control software in wide use.

              Those of you who use and hate CVS may wish to check out SubVersion [tigris.org], a CVS replacement which leverages WebDAV [webdav.org] via an Apache module [webdav.org]. It can be used locally (i.e., sans server) as well, just like CVS. It's still in beta, but we use it and it's served us a lot better than CVS has. The only problem is some dev tools have (shortsighted) tight integration with one particular VCS or another (like CVS or MSVSS), so using an alternative breaks the "convenien
          • Fortunately, I don't have to deal with that crap anymore, as I'm now using Perforce. It's certainly not perfect, but at least it doesn't bite big donkey dick.

            Perforce is actually a pretty decent product. Personally, I prefer the command line interface, but there are plenty of third-party GUI tools [perforce.com] which emulate the P4 windoze client.

            One thing Perforce does seem to have difficulty with (and I'm not sure if this is just the result of user error) is a TRUNK (i.e., HEAD) = PRODUCTION development strategy.
            • We use this strategy to manage our web applications (with CVS) with one exception. "Alpha" is called staging for us, and we branch for it.. fix anything in the staging branch and back-port it to head when QA is done and the staging has been completed (and pushed to production). This allows us to keep working with head while the QA people are doing their thing.

              We came up with this strategy ourselves, and while we aren't naive enough to think we "invented" the procedure, I didn't realize its use was so wide-

      • If he wants integration with Visual Studio then he's made his own fucking bed and he can damn well lie in it.

        As well as being a great source code control system, ClearCase actually integrates very well with Visual Studio.

      • What you actually mean is that you don't know what the expensive alternatives are. There's no shame in admitting you don't know something; try it some day.

        Them's mighty big words coming from an AC. Too bad you couldn't muster the balls to log in.

        I know most all of the alternatives, mainly because I've tried them at one time or another. My comment regarding CVS stands, though.

        BTW, dismissing CVS and then recommending PVCS in the same sentence is the mark of a true ignorant retard asshole, as if the res

    • Re:A coupla things (Score:5, Informative)

      by Circuit Breaker ( 114482 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @08:05AM (#5768281)
      I haven't seen anything that works as well as VSS

      Try Jalindi Igloo (search google for it). It integrates with VS6 as well as, if not better, than VSS. And Tortoise is simply the best UI for version control I have ever used.
    • Plus, developers can work from home seamlessly, which is generally not the case with VSS.

      What's the problem working from home with VSS?

      Sure, you need filesystem access to the repository but you'll need that for other work-from-home stuff anyway and you can easily do that over a VPN.
      • What's the problem working from home with VSS?
        VSS accesses the code DB directly (i.e. there is no active "VSS Server"). That means you have to be able to mount the volume the code DB is on. Which is no problem if it's on the local LAN, but requires extra work to be visible outside the firewall.
        • VSS accesses the code DB directly (i.e. there is no active "VSS Server"). That means you have to be able to mount the volume the code DB is on. Which is no problem if it's on the local LAN, but requires extra work to be visible outside the firewall.

          OK but (as I said on the next line!) chances are you'll need that kind of access for other work-from-home stuff. For example, I like to be able to fetch files from my desk PC when I'm working at home, get remote desktops to test machines, get access to central

    • You are right, VSS doesn't corrupt itself randomly. However, you forgot to mention one instance under which VSS will corrupt itself. If during a checkin, the client machine crashes, your VSS database will become corrupt. Alternatively, if during a checkin, the client machine is power-cycled, the database will become corrupt.

      At one company I worked for, we were supporting roughly twenty developers. The VSS database became corrupt about once a month even after following the other suggestions you list.

      • We have a CVS machine which we connect to (usually) with WinCVS. One day somebody committed a new file that just happened to have the same name as a file that was removed from the same directory two years before. So CVS thought it was the same file. This would ordinarily be fine, except that the case of one of the letters in the name was different in the new name. That caused some confusion between the WinCVS client and the case sensitive CVS server.

        The result was a corrupted repository. Any attempt to do

    • First, VSS is a crap version control system (if only because it's not client/server), but it doesn't corrupt itself randomly. You need to keep your database sizes to under 1GB or so, run ANALYZE on the thing at least every week (or more, depending on the activity) and generally keep binaries (especially large ones) off of it.

      Actually, for practical purposes, SourceSafe does randomly corrupt your database. This is the reason for all the restrictions you mention. It fundamentally requires safe clients, an

    • We currently use VSS version 6. Before that, we used version 5.

      On version 5, SourceSafe would occasionally extract a random character or several from somewhere in a text file when you checked it in, and plonk that character at the end of the file. If you were lucky, the character(s) would be from some identifiable part of the code which would cause it to stop compiling, so you could trace the problem. If you were unlucky, the character(s) would be deleted from a comment and you wouldn't have a hope of f

  • Went from VSS - CVS (Score:5, Informative)

    by HalfFlat ( 121672 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @05:50AM (#5768101)
    We used Visual Source Safe at the beginning of our project (about 10 programmers), despite calls for using CVS instead. VSS did not last three weeks. It is the embarassment of the revision control world. It is Just Broken.

    Note that Microsoft most certainly do not eat their own dog food. At least, they certainly did not then (1998-1999).

    We threw out VSS. Moved to CVS, despite losing Visual Studio integration and past revision history. In fact, we just used CVS from a command window. It worked, and worked well.

    There are commercial and free products now which probably fit your requirements. But if you can't find one, you still ought to ditch VSS and go with something that actually works. It doesn't matter how convenient your source control system is if it doesn't actually control it, or like VSS, actively corrupts it.
    • You didn't have to lose your history or anything. There's a perl script, found here [laine.org] that will migrate your stuff. It is quite nice, and works with revision histories and all. The vss2cvs.pl script will migrate your stuff and another script (don't remember which) will migrate your revision histories.
    • Note that Microsoft most certainly do not eat their own dog food. At least, they certainly did not then (1998-1999).

      No, they still don't - they've got an internal replacement that's command-line only. AFAIK it's basically VSS rewritten to overcome the file size limit. I'm not aware of any moves to sell it but in any case VSS always struck me as a hack developer tool boxed up and sold rather than a polished product. But I've no complaints with it - it's sold to developers who can cope.

      But that aside, ther
  • I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.
    • As I understand it, they're having a hard time selling the SF code, and to add insult to injury at least one of the original developers also have a Free competitor [gforge.org] up.
    • I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.

      But sourceforge isn't a VSS competitor - it's a whole-process management system. Its competitors are Clearcase [rational.com], Sourcecast [collab.net] or the free system aegis. Clearcase has its own source control system but the others are built (AFAIK) on top of CVS - *that's* the VSS
      • clearcase is great and horrible at the same time. It's great because it does its job well and never corrupts data. It's horrible because its expensive, requires HUGE expensive machines to run on, and just isn't all that pretty in some areas. We "upgraded" from cvs to clearcase and the server went from a spare P2 class rack server to some monsterous Sun machine, the developers were not ammused as they would have much rather kept the old box and spent the money on new workstations.

  • Bitkeeper (Score:4, Informative)

    by mTor ( 18585 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @06:01AM (#5768111)
    Give Bitkeeper a try: http://www.bitkeeper.com/ [bitkeeper.com]

    I use it and I'm very happy with it. Heck, even Linux kernel [bkbits.net] is maintained with it.

  • SourceForge is not what you are looking for (Score:3, Informative)

    by halfnerd ( 553515 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @06:01AM (#5768113) Homepage
    Or at least i think so. If I understand this correctly then sourceforge is just like sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] - a hideously large database of projects. I don't think that's what you are looking for. CVS is tested and good. But it has some problems. Go check out subversion too - subversion.tigris.org [tigris.org], it's a cvs-like tool that has fixed many of cvs' inconveniences.
    and BitMovers BitKeeper is used for the Linux-kernel, so it has proven to be very reliable and extendable too.
    • Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project? I'm really interested--I love the TortoiseCVS interface, and probably won't change the version control without something similar (there's a subversion version of Tortoise, so I'm happy with that). And any change in version control systems must at least improve upon CVS.
      • Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project?

        The subversion project is itself hosted in subversion - that's probably the biggest public one.

        There were complaints a few months back about insane memory usage for commits (256mb+) but I think that was a berkeley db bug. Can't remember if it got resolved or not. I'm sure it

  • Gforge (Score:5, Informative)

    by R0 ( 40549 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @06:05AM (#5768120)
    Gforge [gforge.org] is an opensource fork of Sourceforge (What irony?). You can buy support [gforge.org] for it too.

  • Make up your mind... (Score:5, Funny)

    by merriam ( 16227 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @06:47AM (#5768171)
    It must be rock solid, run on Windows...

    Well make up your mind and pick one.

    I know, I know. But someone was bound to say it.

    • I know, I know. But someone was bound to say it.

      Unfortunately there is a lot of truth to this. If you have a mission critical enterprise level application like a source code repository you really should run it on a very robust platform.

      You wouldn't keep your corporate financials on a simple Windows box, so why would you keep the crown jewels (source code) on the same thing?

    • I know someone who ran a 3-line dialup BBS under Windows 95 and used it as a workstation as well.

      He only had to reboot it about every mealtime. Eventually switched to OS/2 when it became clear that this was going to be a non-flyer. But it did work. Kinda. Mostly. Reminds me in so many ways of many mission-critical Excel spreadsheets which is an oxymoron in principle but actually happens IRL. Some complete bananas-for-brains do that kind of thing and don't even keep backups. Aiyaiyai...!

  • FreeVCS (Score:3, Informative)

    by apocamok ( 196093 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @06:49AM (#5768175) Homepage
    At work we switched to Freevcs [freevcs.org] after experiencing one too many VSS database-corruptions.

    FreeVCS is a free (as in beer) client/server VCS, using a relational database such as Firebird or Microsoft SQL Server. It is a stand-alone product, and as such offers no integration to Visual Studio (although some integration to Borland Delphi exists)

    The original author has stopped development and released the source to the open-source project JediCVS [sourceforge.net].
    JediVCS have yet to produce a release, so for now stick with FreeVCS.

    • Re:FreeVCS (Score:3, Funny)

      by Scaba ( 183684 )
      ...relational database such as Firebird...

      I'm confused. I thought Firebird was a browser? How can two unrelated products have the same name? ;>)

      • Firebird is a RDBMS.

        I assume the browser is built on top of it :-)

        Anybody seems to be building everything on top of RDBMSes lately.

        (Mozilla a browser on top of a RDBMS,
        Microsoft an filesystem on top ..) :-)

      • I'm confused. I thought Firebird was a browser? How can two unrelated products have the same name? ;>)

        I'm confused. I thought Firebird was a car? How can two unrelated products have the same name? ;>)

  • Excellent VCS, which also tracks change requests and bugs, making for a great tool for the development process.

    It's neither Free nor free (actually fairly expensive), but it is great.

  • RE: Alternatives to Visual Source Safe (Score:5, Informative)

    by iid_iunknown ( 601764 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @07:50AM (#5768264)
    I have always preferred Rational ClearCase over VSS and have also used a new product from SourceGear called SourceGear Vault which claims to be a compelling replacement for VSS. Well, guess what? They're right. Not only is it a better SCC, but it also has tight integration with both VS *AND* the classic remote access products from SourgeGear (ie. SourceOffSite) for your offsite development staff. Both are recommended, but the Rational tools are a bit pricey for smaller shops. I believe that a 5-node version of SourceGear Vault is priced around $599 (if you already owen SQL Server), or $999 (which includes a SQL Server license). Take a look at SourceGear Vault [sourcegear.com]
    • Clear Case is pretty cool... It is just SOOOOO expensive. I have yet to work in a ClearCase environment that didn't have a fulltime "ClearCase" administrator. This is a 60-120K (pick your geographic location) per year cost ABOVE the licencing and server requirements.

      That said, it is pretty cool in that its representation is a filesystem that you mount so that files are automatically kept current. That said, the whole thing is complicated enough that I always used the "administrator" when I needed to do

    • If you can float the cost of Rational's ClearCase, as in, money is no issue, then ClearCase is, by far, the best source control system. It fully supports parallel development, has a great merger, and just makes life simple for all developers once they learn the system.

      I recommend ClearCase to any shop that has the cash to purchase it (and, yes, it is worth the price, but the price is VERY VERY high).

  • MKS Source Integrity (Score:3, Informative)

    by marko_ramius ( 24720 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @08:55AM (#5768349)
    http://www.mks.com/products/sie [mks.com]

    Secure, stable, fast, multi-platform, good integration with issue tracking system.

    • As a senior developer / team CM guy, I'll second SIE. But it is a bit pricey. The issue tracking (I assume you mean Integrity Manager) is a little complicated, but highly configurable issue tracking/workflow/swiss army knife that integrates well with SIE.
      I also admin the server - its based on WebLogic - and it's pretty simple.
      I can do checkout/checkin via broadband VPN reasonably fast. SIE supports Visual Studio 6, 7, and 7.1 (VS.Net 2002/2003) very well, and it has a good command line interface.
      On the othe

  • cvs - tortoise - jalindi igloo (Score:3, Informative)

    by patazathoth ( 443391 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @09:22AM (#5768400)
    cvs as the engine, you can install it on windows or on a cheap linux box (I prefer the later).

    tortoise as the gui, it integrates in explorer directly, no need for a seperate program or GUI it is simply intuitive.

    Jalindi Igloo as the dev studio integration. I've use it for a while and it was working as well if not better than VSS.

    I've used vss for 6 years (during my redmond era) and had allright success with it but had to check the integrity of the database and we had to use backup a few time.

    We started using cvs when OSX came out and had nothing but success with it. It has its limitation but it is straight foward and I even think it is Open Source (correct me if I am wrong) so if you don't like something, just change it!
    • We started using cvs when OSX came out and had nothing but success with it. It has its limitation but it is straight foward and I even think it is Open Source (correct me if I am wrong) so if you don't like something, just change it!

      True, but it's an open-source dinosaur. The code has been so badly hacked over the years that some influential guys decided it needed a huge rewrite and that's subversion [tigris.org]. When you get *really* large scale CVS use (like the GCC project) that it uses rcs and file locks becomes
  • I had a chance to use PVCS in the past few months and I was really not impressed. They have a great engine, but the GUI is written in JAVA and is so slow and clunky.

    Now, I am sure that someone somewhere wrote a better GUI (since PVCS expose the API to the engine).

    • You must be referring to PVCS Dimensions, which is their database-based product (uses Oracle, last I checked). It is good. The original PVCS, which went through many hands but started as PolyView Version Control System, was worse than RCS. In fact it was a steaming pile. It is hard to irreversibly trash a file with RCS just using co/ci but the PVCS gui could do it easily if you had multiple developers working.
    • we're kinda stuck with Merant PVCS here since we'rea regulated environment and can't switch very easily. PVCS has proven to be ok, but lacks stable integration with VS.NET, making it harder to use. And the comment above is correct: the GUI is horribly slow even in the smallest projects - even if installed on your local workstation. their tech support staff is about average and typically needs 2 or 3 days to solve your problems. in the past, i've actually used vss quite successfully in small to moderatel

  • Perforce (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jmaslak ( 39422 ) on Sunday April 20, 2003 @10:18AM (#5768521)
    It supports branching (a must if you ever plan on releasing a V2 of anything), which, although CVS claims to, CVS does it very badly.

    It is quick.

    It is EASY from an administration standpoint. Easier then VSS. Other then checking your backups once in a while, you never mess with it. It really is "install and forget".

    It allows the possibility for work to continue despite network problems, although I admit this is a bit ugly.

    It has atomic changelists. Unlike CVS, where each file is submitted independently, all files are submitted and succeed or fail as a group. So an entire feature either gets there or doesn't. This also lets you remove the entire feature with one command, and lets your QA department know exactly what has changed (They can ask the developper who submitted the change, "What does this do?" rather then having to ask that for every file that was part of the change - MUCH less work).

    It is cross-platform, on just about anything you'll need it on (including Linux).

    It even has MS Office integration if you want that.

    It has a valid security model, at least when compared to VSS (which has absolutely no security IMHO - yes, you can set passwords and protections and such, but changing a few bytes in the client will nullify those protections!).

    I can't recommend it highly enough. It isn't cheap, but neither is VSS.
    • We use Perforce, as well, and I also would recommend it. One year ago we looked at every SCM pacakge listed in this topic. The only one that solved all of our issues was Perforce. One other item I would bring up is support. Even before you buy there product they offer it. It is top notch, like no other. 90% of the time I have a reply to email in under 30 minutes. The rest is 1-2 hours. There is also phone support if you prefer. They also just released a beta GUI client for Mac and Linux that just r

      • Re:Perforce (Score:2, Interesting)

        by yandros ( 38911 )
        Node-locked named clients, and the lack of flexibility that goes with them, are a large PITA. Branching is better in Perforce -- IF you're on a fast, secure network connection to the server.

        Remote access security in Perforce was terrible when I used it last (about 3 years ago), but maybe it's better now. Attempting to shoehorn it over ssh produced effects much worse than CVS.

        Running a dedicated SQL server for your VCS is a bit of a pain -- or ours was especially bad in some way, 'cause it needed to be

      • Re:Perforce (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Uh, this is to yandros. Your post doesn't have the ring of truth to me...
        That doesn't sound like the Perforce I spec'd and used a few years ago.

        First, our Perforce server was in Toronto,and I had a developer in Vancouver use it with no problems whatever, over broadband and a VPN.

        Second, it was very stable. We were running it as a service on NT and it just would not go down. I run a copy on my dev box at work (NT again) and it never goes down. Its memory footprint is low too. It's not like you're runn

    • Re:Perforce (Score:3, Informative)

      by CompVisGuy ( 587118 )
      I have used Perforce (as a developer, rather than as a respository admin).

      I found Perforce to be an excellent VCS; it integrated very well with our workflow -- once your developers know the basics, the system works very well. As far as I know, it has many advantages over MS's SourceSafe -- try and stay away from the MS stuff if you can.

      There is a Windows GUI for Perforce, and it works well under all UNICES, Windows and others.

      I strongly recommend Perforce. Simple as that.

      Having said that, Perforce isn't
    • I second the Perforce bid, for all of the reasons mentioned.

      I've used it in my job as a software developer at a large organization, and really, really loved it. A few more things worth noting:

      - The atomic change lists are cool, and well worth underlining -- you can very easily back-out an entire change (unlike CVS, which might require you to revert to a previous tag or go and find the affected files, etc.).

      - There are command line tools as well as GUI tools for a huge number of environments. All the cl
    • Perforce is the best I've used. CVS is slow, VSS and PCVS both blow. Maybe subversion will be good, but Perforce is just awesome and VERY fast.
    • Ditto on Perforce. We use it across the company and everyone loves it. The command line tools are excellent, too. I was able, with very little hassle, to intergrate Perforce with 3D Studio Max using nothing but the command line interface and Max's internal scripting language. Now the artists here are checking game assets in and out without even realizing it. The hassle of using a different app just to get at files they want to modify has always been an issue with game artists I've seen. Perforce made it ve

  • StarTeam is an interesting product (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    StarTeam [borland.com] is an interesting product.

    I've never actually used it for production, but several years ago I did some evaluation of different source control systems, and stumbled upon it. It's not free, and it's relatively expensive compared to cheaper solutions such as VSS and Perforce, but they've got one of the coolest feature sets of any revision control system I've seen.

    For example, one thing that I thought was especially cool about it was that you could actually have the bug system link comments to speci
    • Well, I think that ClearCase is the best, the architecture is Client/Server and it is integrated really well with almost all development environment...
    • StarTeam is a nice idea, but it's executed poorly...

      The interface is an abortion, and it's too flexible, to the point where it puts flexibility above useablilty.

      It lets you do too many things that are just wrong (like changing the default working directory for every folder in the tree individually), and doesn't give you enough ways to lock it down so that those in your team that don't understand how it works can't fuck it up....

      However, it is cross platform (it uses java internally), I'm fairly successfu
  • So far, I have yet to see a source control system that is client-server. I've used PVCS, CVS, and VSS. They all store their "database" in some proprietary file array. VSS has the craziest scheme I've seen before, while PVCS and CVS seem to have the basic concept of a file is an archive. But really, for all the same reasons as any other database (security, performance, backup, transactions, ...) it should be client-server.

    Is this not done for historical reasons, or technical ones?
  • Perforce
    Starbase (now a Borland product)
    Clearcase
    PVCS

    and on and on and on and on

    I've heard the most positive feedback concerning Perforce and Starbase.

  • Alternatives to VSS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wrero ( 314883 ) on Monday April 21, 2003 @08:07AM (#5772456)
    PVCS [merant.com] - My software company migrated from MS VSS to PVCS, it works much better - but - at least for our relatively large project, it's kind of slow. We've been using it for about a year and it's worked well.
    Clearcase [rational.com] - Rumored to be "THE version control system", I've heard it is complicated to setup and use, but Rational Clearcase is supposed to be the end all of version control systems. Checking out the link before posting, it seems that Rational software is now owned by IBM?
    Starteam [borland.com] - I evaluated this product a while ago (18-24 months or so ago). It seems that this company has been purchased by Borland. But at any rate, Starteam seemed to be a very comprehensive version control system. We didn't choose Starteam - as many of our developers had already had PVCS experience and at the time Starteam was the new-kid-on-the-block and we didn't want to fight with a new product. We already had enough headaches with MS VSS, we wanted something we knew for certain would be tried and true. That being said, Starteam did look great.
    Last but not least, CVS [cvshome.org] the open source version control system. I've used it a few times, but never set it up or configured it and can't really comment on reliability, etc. I'll assume it's great - I'm know others have mentioned CVS and I'll leave the people that have used it to give you more information.
    • This is the real man's version control system... if I could only count the number of developers that wish they had Clearcase at their current jobs after having worked with it at a prior job.
  • I personally like CVS very much. But I think that I am going to like Subversion
    Subversion [tigris.org]
    even more, in a few versions time. If you can wait a bit more than that you might want to look at an IBM research project called Stellation Version Control
    Stellation [eclipse.org]

    CVS is quite nicely integrated in that super IDE, Eclipse. And the two others have integration underway.

  • I hate VSS with a passion. We've been using it as our Source Control system for many many years where I work. Lately, we get corrupt databases about every week or so. How does it happen? Usually people are connecting to VSS from home through a VPN, and the tunnel breaks in the middle of a checkin to the database. Since VSS's database is managed by the client, if it fails halfway through it is easy for the database to get corrupted. Additionally, the entire VSS database is writable for our entire devel

  • ...as opposed to another (read: better) product.

    Whatever.

    It is great to see MS bashers bash VSS thinking they are bashing MS code.

  • I was checking in source code in VSS, and it was like "bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep!" And then, like, half of my repository was gone. It was a really good repository. I had to code it again twice as fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of.... a bummer.

    Anyway, our VSS never crashed after using it for about 5 years, but ever since I was hired three years ago, I advocated for CVS. I learned a lot in how to initiate change processes, and after about a year, I put together a document comparing the feature
    • By the way, you don't need to leave your previous VSS history behind! We used Perl scripts that we found through Google that convert VSS histories into CVS, comments, dates, and all :-) (and whether or not it's a binary file). The catch is that it's best to not use linked files, since they will appear as two separate files in CVS. On a UNIX-based box, you can do symlinks, I suppose, but with CVSNT, it's not easy if it's possible at all. The Perl scripts even converted the times to GMT, which is what CVS use
    • If you need to run cvs on Windows but need better security than pserver (which, like telnet, sends passwords in cleartext) you might look into Cygwin, which provides (essentially) a unix emulation layer for windows that includes cvs with ssh support.

      Just make sure when you download Cygwin to download cvs, cygrunsrv and openssh 'cause you need them and you don't get them with the default core cygwin download.

      Setting up is a little trickier than CVSNT, but you can find good instructions on ibm's developerWo
  • The original poster hints at the the problems with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, but if anyone doesn't know, I've written up a page on why Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is unsuitable for real world use [highprogrammer.com]. (Yeah, I've been pimping it in my sig for a while, but it's just so on topic....)

    What to replace it with? At home and at work I use CVS [cvshome.org]. Sure, CVS has lots of problems, but at least they're well known problems with easy workarounds. At its core CVS is solid, if dated, software. There are other products I

  • I don't think you'll do any better than StarTeam (now sold via Borland). What is particularly good about StarTeam is that is was born and grew up on Windows, with Unix ports coming later. It feels and acts (for the most part) like a Windows application should -- which can hardly be said about creatures such as ClearCase and MKS.

    There is a nice API to extend it to do new, nifty things. It has bug tracking. It has threaded discussion (which can be associated with items in the repository). You can reach

Slashdot Top Deals

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall

Close