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Windows Source Control for the Lone Developer?

Posted by Cliff on from the version-control-on-a-budget dept.

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?"

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. subversion is easy to use by Adhoc · · Score: 5, Informative
    As long as you stay on a single box, subversion is very easy to use.
    svnadmin create C:\repo
    cd <workdir>

    svn co file:///repo #(might want to check the syntax on that, not sure if it's different on windows)
    svn add foo.c
    svn commit

    etc, etc
    While the details might be off a bit, it will be something like that easy. there is excellent documentation for subversion at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ which covers all the bases really. Where subversion gets complicated is setting up network access, but even that isn't that hard. A couple of hours of reading the red-bean book and you'll be all set. In any case it isn't really any harder than CVS to setup and is more refined. RCS is probably too weak. No support for directories structures. good luck. Adhoc
  2. Tortoise SVN by manonthespoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Source Safe by rrsipov · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.