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Moving from Source Safe to CVS?

Posted by Cliff on from the migrating-your-code-repositories dept.

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?"

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. SmartCVS and build tools by drig · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. CVS vs SourceSafe by schulzdogg · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.