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I disagree, PVCS is awful... it's expensive, the 'GUI' interface is not at all intuitive, the server is unreliable and it doesnt scale. It also lacks (or hard to find) a good diff'ing utility and a useful search utility.
I prefer CVS with one of the gui add-ons like tortoise. In my opinion, the cost/benefit of CVS far outweighs PVCS. I have not used Subversion but hear great things about it.


I disagree. It is very intuitive and functional. It is used at more than 16,000 customer sites worldwide with more than 400,000 licenses (I saw this on their website just now). Here is a demo. Some parts of demo has screenshots. Make your own judgement if you have patience to watch the whole demo.

Disclaimer: I am in no way related to this company. Just happened to use it at a client site.

I have used PVCS in the past. Very good version control application. I am not sure about the cost though but benefits could outweigh cost. Here is the company website.

PVCS - 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 - 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 - 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 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.

They say they are using a new source code control system with "acquired technology" , apparently because the previous version (which I'm assuming is SourceSafe) wasn't up to the task. I'd like more details please ... we are considering ditching a very old version of PVCS where I work. Bitkeeper won't do it, and CVS + Bugzilla isn't a solution.

Where's the comparison with Merant Dimensions, some of the Rational products, or TeamTrack???

Where's the beef???

PVCS or ClearCase or can set you back 5K a workstation.

If you're not using all of the features in these products, they can be replaced by CVS and something like SourceForge.

PVCS Dimensions does too.

PVCS
or any one of a million other source/document control systems.

Dave

I recently had the job of evaluating what SCM system to use for our company. We were using CVS at the time.

I believe that the complaints your bosses have about logging and concurrent editing can all be fairly easily fixed in CVS.

The major gripes we had with CVS were:
. slow (see below)
. merging between branches was miserable, because the system didn't keep track of what had already been merged
. renaming files lost all the history
. windows interface was cumbersome

We actually worked with a system layered on top of CVS that allowed us to submit batches of files at once, in a single transaction. This was the major cause of slowness, and CVS didn't really support transactions, so in some sense we were just fooling ourselves. The other major cause was doing a 'cvs update' on a large tree could be slow.

Most of the problems we had could've been fixed
if we spent the time to fix it. Some (transactions, renaming) we couldn't really fix at all. But, when I looked at everything I wanted to fix in CVS, I found that I had just described Perforce's feature set, and when I looked at how they implemented things, they did it like I would've. Plus, comparing the cost of Perforce (relatively cheap) to the time it would've taken us to implement the same features ...

So, we switched to Perforce, and I've been (more or less) happy since. The branching structure is a little weird (compared to ClearCase's, which is the most intuitive I've seen), but we're learning to live with it.

At a previous company, we used ClearCase. This was also a fine product, and it does a few things that no other product does, but it's very expensive, and a major hassle to administer.
ClearCase (at least in the mode we used) implements its own filesystem, and can provide a level of security that the others just can't. But, is this worth paying 10+ times the amount for it?

I also looked at AccuRev. This was about on a par with Perforce, and had one or two features that looked really cool. But, in the end, Perforce won mostly because we went with the product that had bigger market share and more people had used it before.

VSS wasn't an option because we're a mostly linux based shop, and because I had heard many of the complaints that others are making as well.

PVCS I think is mostly an also-ran in this day and age. I think most new source-system users use one of the other previously mentioned systems.

One new open source project (Subversion) looked promising, but it was too immature for us to use.

Bitkeeper also looked interesting, but not enough so to beat out Perforce or AccuRev.

Another thing you might want to consider is how well the SCM integrates with a change mgmt system (or bug/task database). Perforce has a simplistic change database built in, but it's good enough for what we want it to do, and it can also be used with Bugzilla and a few other systems. Of course, CVS and at least ClearCase can do these as well. I've found Bugzilla somewhat cumbersome to use on limited inspection. Other freeware systems (GNATS, for example) are very weak.

The set of applications available for SCO and not native on Linux is growing smaller by the hour.

The company I work for, RIMS, and a vendor of ours, Merant, will have a joint press release out tomorrow. The process release will be about Merant's porting of their Micro Focus Object COBOL stuff to Linux and our efforts to port our QicClaim/2 product to the COBOL port on Linux. <marketing speak>QC/2, as with all our software, is aimed at the healthcare verticle market. QC/2 is used to administrate health benefit programs, mostly used be third party administrators.</marketing speak>

No, its not open sourced, but its the start of greater use of Linux and open source projects within my company. Something I've been fighting a year for. We hope to have some open source stuff out there in the near future. We're deceiding the what, where, and when of all that. But I'm pretty excited as I'll be a big part of all of it.

The company I work for, RIMS, and a vendor of ours, Merant, will have a joint press release out tomorrow. The process release will be about Merant's porting of their Micro Focus Object COBOL stuff to Linux and our efforts to port our QicClaim/2 product to the COBOL port on Linux. <marketing speak>QC/2, as with all our software, is aimed at the healthcare verticle market. QC/2 is used to administrate health benefit programs, mostly used be third party administrators.</marketing speak>

No, its not open sourced, but its the start of greater use of Linux and open source projects within my company. Something I've been fighting a year for. We hope to have some open source stuff out there in the near future. We're deceiding the what, where, and when of all that. But I'm pretty excited as I'll be a big part of all of it.