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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?"
Node-locked named clients, and the lack of flexibility that goes with them, are a large PITA. Branching is better in Perforce -- IF you're on a fast, secure network connection to the server.
Remote access security in Perforce was terrible when I used it last (about 3 years ago), but maybe it's better now. Attempting to shoehorn it over ssh produced effects much worse than CVS.
Running a dedicated SQL server for your VCS is a bit of a pain -- or ours was especially bad in some way, 'cause it needed to be taken down for maintenance WAAAY too often.
Perforce is a pretty nice VCS for a dedicated group sitting at exactly the same desktops, on a closed/protected net every day. Even better if those desktops all run the same version of Windows. Introduce laptops into the mix and things start to get tricky. Try to add a developer base who migrate between working locations (like `home' and `office') and want to be able to work in both places, and you'll find yourself missing the good old days of CVS.
Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project? I'm really interested--I love the TortoiseCVS interface, and probably won't change the version control without something similar (there's a subversion version of Tortoise, so I'm happy with that). And any change in version control systems must at least improve upon CVS.
--Be human.
Does anyone here have any real world experience running Subversion? It has lofty goals, and I've d/l'ed the PC version to play with, but how does it handle 100s of programmers retrieving the latest version for a rather large project?
The subversion project is itself hosted in subversion - that's probably the biggest public one.
There were complaints a few months back about insane memory usage for commits (256mb+) but I think that was a berkeley db bug. Can't remember if it got resolved or not. I'm sure it will be before svn 1.0.
The GCC project have CVS scalability issues and would like to migrate to subversion and there are a few GCC guys on the subversion mailing lists, so they at least have confidence in it.
Uh, this is to yandros. Your post doesn't have the ring of truth to me...
That doesn't sound like the Perforce I spec'd and used a few years ago.
First, our Perforce server was in Toronto,and I had a developer in Vancouver use it with no problems whatever, over broadband and a VPN.
Second, it was very stable. We were running it as a service on NT and it just would not go down. I run a copy on my dev box at work (NT again) and it never goes down. Its memory footprint is low too. It's not like you're running Oracle... The fact that it has a real database backend does not get in the way. Au contraire...
I would highly recommend Perforce to just about every situation. However, it would be *really* nice if it allowed read-only replicated databases.
Are you listening, Perforce?