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Alternative to SourceSafe in a Commercial Environment?
Jim the Bad asks: "After Visual SourceSafe inexplicably corrupted itself one time too many, my Boss has asked me to evaluate the alternatives.
This site lists some alternatives, and SourceForge is a commercial product that might suit. Are there any more? It must be rock solid, run on Windows and it must be possible to migrate existing SourceSafe databases. Developer Studio integration is also very desirable. What product would you recommend?"
We used Visual Source Safe at the beginning of our project (about 10 programmers), despite calls for using CVS instead. VSS did not last three weeks. It is the embarassment of the revision control world. It is Just Broken.
Note that Microsoft most certainly do not eat their own dog food. At least, they certainly did not then (1998-1999).
We threw out VSS. Moved to CVS, despite losing Visual Studio integration and past revision history. In fact, we just used CVS from a command window. It worked, and worked well.
There are commercial and free products now which probably fit your requirements. But if you can't find one, you still ought to ditch VSS and go with something that actually works. It doesn't matter how convenient your source control system is if it doesn't actually control it, or like VSS, actively corrupts it.
I use it and I'm very happy with it. Heck, even Linux kernel is maintained with it.
Or at least i think so. If I understand this correctly then sourceforge is just like sourceforge.net - a hideously large database of projects. I don't think that's what you are looking for. CVS is tested and good. But it has some problems. Go check out subversion too - subversion.tigris.org, it's a cvs-like tool that has fixed many of cvs' inconveniences.
and BitMovers BitKeeper is used for the Linux-kernel, so it has proven to be very reliable and extendable too.
Gforge is an opensource fork of Sourceforge (What irony?). You can buy support for it too.
At work we switched to Freevcs after experiencing one too many VSS database-corruptions.
FreeVCS is a free (as in beer) client/server VCS, using a relational database such as Firebird or Microsoft SQL Server. It is a stand-alone product, and as such offers no integration to Visual Studio (although some integration to Borland Delphi exists)
The original author has stopped development and released the source to the open-source project JediCVS.
JediVCS have yet to produce a release, so for now stick with FreeVCS.
I have always preferred Rational ClearCase over VSS and have also used a new product from SourceGear called SourceGear Vault which claims to be a compelling replacement for VSS. Well, guess what? They're right. Not only is it a better SCC, but it also has tight integration with both VS *AND* the classic remote access products from SourgeGear (ie. SourceOffSite) for your offsite development staff. Both are recommended, but the Rational tools are a bit pricey for smaller shops. I believe that a 5-node version of SourceGear Vault is priced around $599 (if you already owen SQL Server), or $999 (which includes a SQL Server license). Take a look at SourceGear Vault
I haven't seen anything that works as well as VSS
Try Jalindi Igloo (search google for it). It integrates with VS6 as well as, if not better, than VSS. And Tortoise is simply the best UI for version control I have ever used.
Secure, stable, fast, multi-platform, good integration with issue tracking system.
cvs as the engine, you can install it on windows or on a cheap linux box (I prefer the later).
tortoise as the gui, it integrates in explorer directly, no need for a seperate program or GUI it is simply intuitive.
Jalindi Igloo as the dev studio integration. I've use it for a while and it was working as well if not better than VSS.
I've used vss for 6 years (during my redmond era) and had allright success with it but had to check the integrity of the database and we had to use backup a few time.
We started using cvs when OSX came out and had nothing but success with it. It has its limitation but it is straight foward and I even think it is Open Source (correct me if I am wrong) so if you don't like something, just change it!
StarTeam is an interesting product.
I've never actually used it for production, but several years ago I did some evaluation of different source control systems, and stumbled upon it. It's not free, and it's relatively expensive compared to cheaper solutions such as VSS and Perforce, but they've got one of the coolest feature sets of any revision control system I've seen.
For example, one thing that I thought was especially cool about it was that you could actually have the bug system link comments to specific revisions of files in the repository. And they actually have an SDK for custom integration, so you can easily integrate it with your own custom tools.
That being said, CVS works OK if you're doing pretty straightforward stuff. But managing multiple branches on CVS? Ugh!
I have used Perforce (as a developer, rather than as a respository admin).
I found Perforce to be an excellent VCS; it integrated very well with our workflow -- once your developers know the basics, the system works very well. As far as I know, it has many advantages over MS's SourceSafe -- try and stay away from the MS stuff if you can.
There is a Windows GUI for Perforce, and it works well under all UNICES, Windows and others.
I strongly recommend Perforce. Simple as that.
Having said that, Perforce isn't free, and CVS is. I currently use CVS and am reasonably happy with it. The TortoiseCVS Windows client makes integrating the use of the VCS into workflow easy. However, CVS does have some problems, and the Subversion project is trying to solve these. I think most people find learning CVS a steeper learning curve than learning Perforce.
Bottom line: If you can afford Perforce, go with that. If you are prepared to live with CVS's steeper learning curve and problems (these are minor -- CVS is the de facto standard for VCS among the Open Source software movement), or want cost free version control, go with CVS.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
Perforce is free-as-in-beer for the development of software that is licensed exclusively under an Open Source license.
http://www.perforce.com/perforce/price.html
pooptruck
Fortunately, I don't have to deal with that crap anymore, as I'm now using Perforce. It's certainly not perfect, but at least it doesn't bite big donkey dick.
Perforce is actually a pretty decent product. Personally, I prefer the command line interface, but there are plenty of third-party GUI tools which emulate the P4 windoze client.
One thing Perforce does seem to have difficulty with (and I'm not sure if this is just the result of user error) is a TRUNK (i.e., HEAD) = PRODUCTION development strategy.
In other words, your mainline sources always reflect what is (or is about to be) in production (that is, assuming you only release from one branch, like a website or something). To start a new project you branch from the mainline (or another branched project) and when you're ready for alpha testing, you release checkin restrictions on the mainline, merge your changes for the project back into the mainline, fix conflicts, start testing and make any repairs to the mainline. Then when, you're ready to release, you freeze the mainline again, tag it and push it to production.
I know you're probably asking, "why the hell would you do that?" The answer is that, theoretically if you've got one product you're releasing, but like to work on several different versions concurrently, then this branching strategy makes sense.
The problem with Perforce (and, again, this could be because of user error) is that it seems to generate unnecessary conflicts when merging back into the mainline. I don't know if this has been made easier in recent releases, but you may wish to make branching and merging a high priority test when evaluating any VCS software.
moto411.com
As I understand it, they're having a hard time selling the SF code, and to add insult to injury at least one of the original developers also have a Free competitor up.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.
But sourceforge isn't a VSS competitor - it's a whole-process management system. Its competitors are Clearcase, Sourcecast or the free system aegis. Clearcase has its own source control system but the others are built (AFAIK) on top of CVS - *that's* the VSS competitor here.
Both Perforce and Subversion are client-server. Perforce is excellent -- I haven't used Subversion.
I was checking in source code in VSS, and it was like "bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep!" And then, like, half of my repository was gone. It was a really good repository. I had to code it again twice as fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of.... a bummer.
:-). It runs as an NT service, and we're currently running it in pserver mode. It supports NT authentication, but my development team is spread across several domains since it's a multi-organization development effort. In your case, NT authentication probably works, or if you're using ActiveDirectory, it supports kerberos and other stuff, too :-).
:-), and it's all on Windows.
Anyway, our VSS never crashed after using it for about 5 years, but ever since I was hired three years ago, I advocated for CVS. I learned a lot in how to initiate change processes, and after about a year, I put together a document comparing the feature sets of VSS to CVS. JBuilder integration with CVS was a nice feature, since that's what we use, It was CVS's excellent branch management capabilities that ultimately drove us away from VSS, since we were starting to need to do branching on stable releases during the next version's development cycles. VSS sort-of does branching, but very poorly. I had to document WinCVS 1.2 myself for the development team, but since the switch, our revision control management has been substantially more useful, and now we have a sense that it's working for us rather than working for it like with VSS.
We didn't need any BSD or Linux boxes. We use CVSNT at http://www.cvsnt.org and it works like a charm
We're going to set up the ViewCVS web interface soon so that we can get server-side views of our repository. The TortoiseCVS (sp?) Explorer integration is very nice, too, so you can see what files are modified and such right in the Explorer.
For us, CVSNT, WinCVS 1.2, and TortoiseCVS works very well