Moving from Source Safe to CVS?

Snowfox asks: "At Midway Games, we're currently using Microsoft's SourceSafe. I'm evaluating other options, such as CVS. Currently, SourceSafe is used not only for source code, but art assets, project management documents and more. Has anyone made a move from SourceSafe to CVS? Can you comment on your experiences?"

"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?"

Comments

WinCVS

[SsC]

We did this where I work. It's been great using CVS instead of SourceSafe, as CVS doesn't corrupt projects for no apparent reason. We're using WinCVS on the desktops. Sure, it doesn't have integration into the VS6 IDE, but we've made do pretty easily without it.

The other advantage of this was we got to build a nice linux box and put it in the 'officially supported' rack.. heh. :)

HTH.

Binary diff

[cowbutt]

You might like to take a look at using xdelta for your binary files. Who knows, maybe Midway can sponsor the integration of xdelta with CVS?