Slashdot Mirror
Moving from Source Safe to CVS?
"Many projects have been suffering problems with SourceSafe. I believe this owes to its leaving management of the source database to the client program instead of the server. A client machine locking up or losing net access in the middle of a check-in can do serious damage. Further, the results of slightly different versions and third-party access utilities with imperfect implementations should be pretty obvious.
For programmers, the two IDEs we use are Visual Studio and CodeWarrior. Both the Linux and Windows versions of CodeWarrior have CVS built in. I can find a few Visual Studio CVS plugins, but no rave reviews of any of them.
For artists and managers, I'm not sure where to look. They definitely need a Windows GUI tool; again, I've found a few options, but none seem quite so easy as SourceSafe. I also worry about whether CVS the right tool for large binaries. As a game company, we deal with 3DS Max files, bitmaps, Word documents and a fair number of compiled executables. Will CVS effectively store these based on differences, or will the database bloat?"
I haven't used this myself but surfing over to the WinCVS website, I found cvsscc. It's a project to map the scc stuff that MS uses to cvs. Another attempt, perhaps more mature, is Jalindi Igloo. The first paragraph from the website says:
"Jalindi Igloo is a program that allows you to connect Microsoft Visual Studio and other IDEs directly to a CVS repository. The program is completely free and can be used anyway you like."
These look to be just what you are looking for.
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
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
About a year ago the company where I work moved from Sourcesafe to CVS. The main reason was a series of corrupted databases that dragged work to a halt for hours.
For the coder CVS is fantastic. CVSWeb, bonsai, and (my favorite) LXR make viewing code, managing checkins, and searching code easy. If you have a mixed linux/windows shop both groups can use the same tool.
For the non coders it's not as nice. The windows interfaces are decent (especially TortoiseCVS) and let people work fairly well.
However it all breaks down in binaries. CVS Can't diff binaries, cvs tools can't preview them, and all in all they aren't handled cleanly. People will check the same file in twice, overwrite changes, things like that. You can recover without too much hassle (If you're familiar with CVS, but the first few times will be ugly)
Even with the large amount of binaries you had I would still say switch, the auditing tools for CVS make it worth it (The stability isn't bad either). But you will not solve any problems with binary files.
CVS does take some retraining, instead of locking files you have to get used to people merging before they check in. Those problems disapear fairly quickly, but there will be a bump of a few weeks while people get used to that.
Check out Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org). It is still in pre-alpha but it will fix a *lot* of the problems CVS has had. Some people are already starting to use it with the just the (buggy) features is already has. Should be BETA within a month or so. It can version directories and symlinks as well as regular files and it fixes the problems CVS has with binaries. It is already ported to Unix (Linux, *BSD, etc.) and Windoze.
I happen to also work for a game development house, in the IT department. We have been using Sourcesafe 6 for a while now, but have found that it is often corrupting itself, not the kind of behavior that you want in your version control software. Cvs wasn't a good choice for us, being mostly a Windows shop, and Cvs isn't known to always handle certain types of multimedia files well. And there is a certain amount of comfort in having a commercial package that you can get help from[and for those who are about to flame me, I do like cvs, and I am sure there is some way to get support]. Our company has recently started using a program called Perforce for version control. Several of our projects are on it now, and we haven't heard a peep out of them as far as problems go. You can find more information at http://www.perforce.com/ . It might be a better solution that cvs, and it might not be, but it's worth evaluating.