Quote:Original post by JohnBolton
Stay away from SourceSafe.

*sigh* Why say that and not back anything up. Thats your opinion. Don't just state somethink as fact, it helps no-one.

I have used a lot of source control systems over the years, and I'm currently using Evolution for one project, which has been marketed a lot recently, and CVS+TortoiseCVS for everything else. For a single developer Evolution is free. Just download the trial version, and it becomes a single licene copy after 30 days.

I have had a few issues with Evolution ('Losing' a copy of an important file was the worst, but it sometimes loses the status of the controlled files, and you have to remind it.) Integration with .net is good (and useful) though I am unaware of how it copes with other IDE's. There is no need to have a net connection, as all source control can be done on the host machine.

Subversion is very popular, and probably worth a look into, but I havevery limited expereince with that appliaction, so I can't say any more. But I can say, if you use Tortoise (in conjunction with what ever source control method you use), you can't go wrong.

Spree

Quote:Original post by Cygon
Does one really need any justification to say SourceSafe is bad ?

Of course they do. I know why ppl think it sucks, but others don't. SourceSafe worked exceptionally well for me, and I used it for years. Others havnt been so lucky, its the way life is!

The OP is obviously looking for some good _advice_, so you can assume (I don't want to be derogitory(sp?) but its best to) they know little about all the various options. A reasoned discuss is much better in this case than a blatent statement of opinion.

Spree

Quote:Original post by SpreeTree
Of course they do. I know why ppl think it sucks, but others don't. SourceSafe worked exceptionally well for me, and I used it for years. Others havnt been so lucky, its the way life is!

My main gripes with VSS are:

1. It loses your source code. This seems to be a fairly major issue. If a medium/large number of developers (say more than 2) are working on a medium/large repository (say more than 50mb), then it frequently becomes corrupted. There is extensive documentation explaining how to recover files, and how to repair / analyse the db, and such like, but the bottom line is, it WILL become corrupted if used in a nontrivial scenario. I've seen this happen loads of times.

As far as I can tell, VSS works fine as long as only one person uses it at a time - which sort of defeats the point of SCM.

2. It doesn't understand what deleting a file is.

Visual Sourcesafe doesn't understand about deleting files. When you delete a file, it removes it from the repository and places it in some kind of "archive". This means that if you get an old version, that file will be missing.

Moreover, when other developers update from VSS, the file won't be deleted from their working copies, rather they will just have this stale file lying around causing irritation.

Lastly, if you decide to re-create a file which WAS deleted, you have two options
- Lose the history of the old file (forget the original deleted file EVER existed)
- Lose the deletion - the new file assumes the identity of the old file, and no record is kept that it was ever deleted.

Both of these options are unacceptable, as it means that you can't just say "Show me a copy of the source code on date X" because deleted files' history is wrong.

3. It's slow - even over a decent network
4. It doesn't work over the internet, or even a WAN, respectably, without third party commercial add-ons (none of which I've tried, so I can't speak for them)

But for me the real killer is losing your source code.

It is well known that Microsoft internally do not use VSS on some major projects.

Mark

You shouldn't forget to mention darcs,
which i find very powerful and nice.

(http://abridgegame.org/darcs/)

/Nico