Slashdot Mirror

Allow me to solve your problems right now:

http://tortoisecvs.sourceforge.net/ (For CVS Servers)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ (For Subversion servers)

Tortoise will tell your users everything they need to know about the files status right through Windows Explorer. Teaching them how to do checkins and tree updates is also quite easy, thanks to the customized right-click menu. Advanced options like diffing, merging, and branching are still available through the submenus, but your users should be able to get their work done without resorting to those. (At least, not until they're ready.)

Of course, the fact that these are graphics designers may complicate issues somewhat. If they're using a Mac, they won't be able to use Tortoise. In which case, my next recommendation falls on SmartCVS:

http://www.smartcvs.com/

SmartCVS is great for Macintoshes, although it does take slightly more training than Tortoise. The only problem you may run into, however, is that SmartCVS chokes on massive directories of files. I don't know if this problem has been fixed or not, but it was a serious problem for one of the source trees I worked on. (Think gigabytes of data spread across thousands of files.)

CVS/SVN are by no means perfect solutions, but I can't think of anything better off the top of my head. Hope this helps!

I use SmartCVS (for CVS) and they have a GUI client for SVN now. http://smartcvs.com/

Try SmartCVS, it's the best CVS client I've used by some distance.

I'm fairly sure anybody who's tried SVN would never want to go back to CVS.

There are great CVS clients available that may ease your pain, though.
TortoiseCVS allows the user to commit files just by right-clicking on them. It's a great way to incite people to put their work under version control when they don't want to be bothered with learning and using more complicated software.
SmartCVS allows you to do the more complex CVS operations (pinning a revision, locking a file, etc...) quite easily. And it has a great interface, too.

DataDino - I'm using a data model compiler I developed so I don't write as much SQL anymore. When I do, it's either through the command line mysql client, the C++/Qt MySQLCC editor from MySQL (looks a lot like DataDino) or my own custom reporting app.

Ah, but DataDino provides access to multiple database vendors (read: MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.) on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, HP, and many other OSes! Not to mention that it's about $450 cheaper. $495 cheaper (i.e. free) if you only need to do simple tasks. :-)

Granted, it doesn't (yet) have some database specific features such as server settings, but those settings are often managed by the DB sysadmin with command line tools anyway.

JGoodies - 5 years ago I used a VB app a buddy wrote for this ;o) Now, the command line tool du does a great job.

In my experience, Unix machines don't suffer from the "lost file syndrome" as badly as Windows machines. This probably has a lot to do with files being forcefully kept in home directories. Usually when a Unix machine is a mess, everyone knows it's a mess but is too lazy to clean it up. :-)

As to a custom solution in VB, I'll bet it didn't have pie charts, graphs, "top 100" listings, and other great features that help find those lost ISOs, installers, temp files, etc. Oh, and did I mention that it's free? :-)

Azureas - This probably wouldn't be a bad Java app as you start it up and then leave it running. Ignoring RAM consumption, it probably performs pretty well.

The Java startup time is really overrated. It actually takes the regular BitTorrent GUI longer to start than the Azureas GUI. I think it has something to do with its poor handling of large file hashes.

Too bad I don't use BitTorrent...

You use Linux and you don't use BitTorrent to download it?! String him up by his pinky toe!

Seriously, BitTorrent is WAY faster than trying to get ISOs from the primary download mirrors. Every download actually increases bandwidth to the BT network, so more downloaders == faster downloads.

Wurm Online - Ok, pretty sure I hate you now. Just what I need... Another pretty cool looking game I can play ;o) And as long as it starts up in under 5 minutes, I could care less.

BWHAHAHAHA!!! You've fallen for my evil plan! Too bad you're on Linux, or you'd fall for my 4K game contest entry called WarGames. Sadly, I was too lazy and too constrained by space to add support for Linux. The problem is that Full Screen mode is not currently supported on Linux, and I didn't bother to check that in my code. A simple fix is to comment out the method to set the resolution in the "main()" method and recompile.

BTW, I forgot to mention anything about SmartCVS. Thomas Singer would wring my neck if he found out. Actually, I should wring my own neck as it's really a great product. I usually use the built in IDE functionality for CVS checkins, but for tree maintenance, tracking changes, and just generally working with the whole tree at a high level, I always drop to SmartCVS. If you're still using anything other than TortoiseCVS (sadly only available on Windows), you NEED to do yourself a favor and check out SmartCVS.

Well considering Java's startup time removes it from all manner of applications, it's a bit of a strawman to argue that startup time doesn't matter.

*cough* *cough*
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit

Please take your bullshit trolling elsewhere. There are those of us with work to do.

Yes, Java didn't deliver on the client side.

I don't know about that. I think that there just isn't enough work put into the GUI by most people. Creating a *nice* GUI is HARD, no matter what system you're using. Macs make it a bit easier with the philosophy that every window should be as simple as possible. However, Windows (the standard most software strives for) strives to cram as many buttons and controls in as small of a space as possible. Under Windows, your program needs toolbars, drop down menus, side bars, dockable sub -windows, MDI frames, etc. That's a lot of work! None the less, there are some good examples of Java clients that can meet that standard. Here are a few links:

jGoodies, masters of the Java GUI
DataDino, my own Java based commercial product.
SmartCVS, a multi-platform CVS GUI.

One nice CVS frontend is SmartCVS (www.smartcvs.com). It's written in Java, so it's cross platform (I tried it under Windows, Solaris and Linux). It aims to replace VSS's explorer. You can get a feature-restricted version for free or pay something like $35 for the full version.

One thing that you should promote about the move is the number of tools that are available for CVS. For instance, there's CVSWeb. It's a web frontend. There's CVS Search which lets you search through comments, etc. A search of freshmeat comes up with a lot of choices.

Finally, remember that there are scripts to help migrate from VSS to CVS. vss-to-cvs

-Dave