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Windows Source Control for the Lone Developer?
bitFlipper asks: "I'm the sole developer of embedded software for a small company. Currently I'm maintaining about five different product lines, each with about 30K lines of code and 100+ files. At the moment I'm winging it without a version control system (using snapshots to CD-R), but this is an unhealthy state of affairs. The open source/big project model of many developers scattered across the globe doesn't apply here--it's just me. And since I have to provide my own tools, the budget for this is near zero. It also has to run on Win32. Oh, and the code I'm developing is not open source. I've looked at RCS (which is certainly simple, but maybe too simple) and Subversion (which is probably overkill). What can people recommend for a version control system that's free or low cost, Win32 compatible, and simple to set up, use and maintain?"
here.
Due to the fact that SVN isn't available for Windows (a native port, no cygwyn stuff), I recommend either Perforce or CVSNT + WinCVS. I've used CVSNT at work and home for some time and it works great.
The place where I work (embedded software development as well) uses QVCS. It was there before I arrived, so I am not sure about the setup, but overall works great, and the license cost maxes out at $100 for 4 users. You install it on a Windows box, and then launch the client copies by providing a shortcut to the server install, so cannot run more than 4 simultaneous copies, but that works for us.
I have had great success using Tortoise CVS. It allows you to use a local directory as your repository rather than having to set up a CVS Server.
It integrates into the Windows shell so you can very easily see what files have changes visually from the icon, and all normal CVS operations can be done from the context menu in Windows Explorer.
On the other hand, cvs isn't terrible - and you don't need to be doing OSS or huge # of devs to warrant its use. Cygwin allows you you run in windows, and there is also a windows version of the cvs server.
But look, if you are developing something windows based, and using MS products or IDE's, VSS is not out of the question...it plays well with other MS tools, so it might make the most sense.
...begins in wonder
CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) is definitely the way to go.
Here are some links to get you started:
CVS On Windows
WinCVS GUI (very nice, uses Python undeneath)
Tortoise CVS
CVS NT Wiki
Component CVS for Windows
All of these are CVS for Windows tools. CVS is a great revision control system.
- Vincit qui patitur.
CVS and subversion are just as complicated as each other. If anything, subversion is easier to use than CVS ever was, and certainly easier to administrate. You can't say that CVS is simpler than subversion as they follow the same model of use, but subversion is somewhat more streamlined and there are less gotcha's to bite you in the ass.
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Tortoise SVN is a version of the subversion client server that integrates with windows 2000, XP.
Right click on a file or folder to check it in, create a repository and just about everything else. It's actually very simple to use and you get all the power of a Subversion.
I was just researching this very question for myself today. Found a nifty comparison between several source control systems. Perforce and BitKeeper seem like the most complete systems, with Monotone and Subversion close on their heels. The trial version of Perforce works for up to 2 people with all features enabled. It gets kind of expensive if you need more than that ($750/seat). Couldn't find actual pricing for BitKeeper, although they were prompt in replying to an email to their sales address and I'm discussing it with them.
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My team used to use Source Safe (6.0), and with just a few people it ended up being really horrible. The files are stored in a big binary (I think) mess which caused problems at least twice when SourceSafe decided it was corrup. Tool support (at the time) was pretty awful (outside of Visual Studio, and a few other programs). We moved to CVS. While CVS has some issues (handeling of binary files, etc) it works. I have had problems with Windows GUI tools though. The best we've found seems (ironically) to be LinCVS (lincvs.org). Also, subversion in local mode might work for you. Finally, I seem to recall that several major commercial tools have a free 1 or 2 user limited version.
I disagree, PVCS is awful... it's expensive, the 'GUI' interface is not at all intuitive, the server is unreliable and it doesnt scale. It also lacks (or hard to find) a good diff'ing utility and a useful search utility.
I prefer CVS with one of the gui add-ons like tortoise. In my opinion, the cost/benefit of CVS far outweighs PVCS. I have not used Subversion but hear great things about it.
Another big plus to subversion under windows is TortoiseSVN.
This client runs as a shell extension right in explorer, so now all your VCS commands are just a rightclick away. It also includes the ability of configuring what commands are nested in the Tortoise SVN submenu, and which are out on the main context menu. All the ease of use of winzip or powerarchiver for version control. It also adds useful columns to your details view, and has a handy repository browser.
If you're on the go a lot and hop between systems, setting up apache for windows and adding OpenSSL and the Subversion modules are easy (drop me a message and I can point you to some good how-tos, but the Subversion Book (on tigris.org) is pretty much all you need). Once the modules are in place, it's only half a dozen lines in your httpd.conf to open up authenticated https access.
I currently use subversion+tortoise on all my windows machines and the commandline interface on my linux laptop. I run the server from my Win2k workstation with a single port routed through my firewall box.
I use it not just for projects, but also for my thunderbird and firefox profiles (except for the platform specific files), my mp3 collection, desktop, documents, pretty much everything i use on a daily basis.
I also have an archive tree thats not actively checked out anywhere.
DONT PANIC
... is probably what you want. A single GUI app, no Subversion server necessary. It uses a folder on your hard drive as the repository instead of a WebDAV server etc. It seems to implement Subversion internally or something...
TortoiseSVN is here
I use version control on my local Win32 machine to manage different versions of files. I've used both TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN in local repository mode, and I highly recommend TortoiseSVN over TortoiseCVS. Forget CVS, really! SVN is much better, even for personal use. It is lightweight, and you don't have to run any server -- the client manages everything for you. Here's information on running TortoiseSVN in local repository mode (with screenshots and all)
Quote:
"If you're not working in a team but working alone on a project and still want your work under version control you can also access a repository locally. This kind of repository access is also very handy if you just want to try out some Subversion commands and you don't want to risk screwing your "official" repository."
One of the real benefits is being able to make changes, test them, and then revert all or some of the changes easily when needed, i.e. a safety-blanket.
Another is being able to track the history of your work in a blow-by-blow fashion: knowing why changes were made is important.
The ease of use is the key factor: you want to be easily able to add files to the version control repository, determine which files have changed and how they have changed vis-à-vis the repository copy, and rapidly add new versions to the repository. If you have to memorise a forest of command-line commands, or navigate a complicated GUI, you won't use it. Copying stuff to CD-R also takes time.
The Tortoise versions of CVS and Subversion both score very high on those criteria: you are always a menu-click away from the necessary actions, and the Windows Explorer shows the current state and version information. The file properties sheets are enhanced with new ones showing the versions & branches of the file in the repository, and visualising differences between the current and any past version is also easy.
So your question is: what can I possibly lose by not having keept your work under version control? Is the risk worth it?
Try either of Tortoise SVN or CVS (using a local repository in both cases, so a complicated repository setup is not necessary), they both have fairly decent documentation (there is no way to avoid a couple of hours of reading), but remember that they both require some changes and adjustment in working methods: give them time.
(Disclaimer I once wrote an emacs mode for subversion, but have never used it in anger).
CVS works more in the "stamping" way you suggest.When you create a project you import all the files that you care about, the sources the test scripts, and any documentation that you care about.
After that you checkout a clean copy from your new repository and have a blast working on it.
When you have implemented a new feature, or made a new change you then run 'cvs commit'.
The commit process examines the local files for any changes from the copies in the repository (ie the last stamp) and then saves them - after running an editor to ask for some description of the changes.
Alternatively you can trash all the work you've just done and revert to the previous checkpoint - or any other point in the history of each file.
At any time you can run 'cvs diff' to see what has changed in your local copy but you must manage the committing yourself. All the source control systems I've used have been like this.
In practice it works well as you only checkout once then you make regular commits based upon the code you're working on. eg commit after a new feature, or a bug fix.
One thing worth noting is that 'cvs diff' will just tell you that a binary file has changed, without showing the details, so a cvs diff isn't very useful on an excel spreadsheet.
I hope that helped.
We use SourceGear vault at work and it works great. It integrates well with Visual Studio and the provided client is easy to use as well. It does cost money, but it was pretty reasonable compared to the alternatives we looked at ($200 per user), including CVS since it took so long to get setup, there would be a learning curve for everyone, and the extra time it takes for everyone to use it would more than offset the cost.
We tried perforce as well, but it didn't even compare to SourceGear, and we had a lot of problems getting it to work well with Visual Studio .NET, for web-based projects especially.
The best source control system I ever used was in VisualAge for Java from IBM. I used it on a big Java project at one of my clients. It was integrated with the IDE and tracked changes to individual methods in the classes you were working on. Every time you saved, it would store that version in your local repository. I liked being able to version and name each class, package, and project. You can call them anything you want, but if you put numbers at the end, it will automatically increment them the next time (i.e. naming something "SSTP 1.4.1" will let you automatically version it to be "SSTP 1.4.2" without having to type anything. The local repository was in one big file that held all your changes until you version something to the server. You could even copy that file and take it somewhere else and keep all your changes. I was thinking of writing something similar in C#, anyone else interested?
I'm currently using FreeVCS to maintain a source tree with 965 files, about 30k each. It's an interesting approach in that it stores all the code in a database (DBISAM by default). It's designed for Delphi developers, but I am using to store a game engine (C++) and the associated scripts (TorqueScript), and I haven't had a problem with it yet. It also implements check out messages (why did you check this file out? "To fix the wankiness in doSomething()"), which can be quite useful once you get into multi-developer projects (like the one I'm on).
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I don't have any experice w/ subversion. With CVS the changes are tracked per-file. You can "tag" a directory structure to create a named point that you can later use. For binary files CVS just keeps a copy of each different version. As I understand it subverion is a good bit better than CVS on a number of things including: commands to rename or move files/directories which preserve the information about the change (there is no good way to rename or move anything in CVS, although some if you have a small team you can work around this with some hacks). Subversion is also supposed to be much smarter about storing binary files, in terms of storing binary diffs, but this still doesn't allow you to compare the contents the way you can with text files. If possible, instead of Excel, look at something like OpenOffice - it has a 'flat xml file' format (the default is xml zipped into an sw* file). This would allow you to check it into CVS/Subversion/anything-else, and then use the powerful text comparison utilities that are part of these tools.