Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Comes with Visual Studio, and will do just about anything a group of 1-5 developers could want.
I know people trash Source Safe, but for small groups of developers, it isn't that bad.
Otherwise, you could try The Valt (http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/index.asp), but you need SQL Server to run it.
Bad User. No biscuit!
How about Darcs?
I was just recently looking to move away from CVS for my personal projects. I'm not always home, and I wanted to have copies of my repositories on at least my laptop and desktop.
At first, I was leaning towards trying out GNU Arch. But I really wanted something that had a working win32 client. So I took a look at Darcs.
I'm very happy with it so far. It is extremely easy to set up and use (but I haven't seen any gui frontends if that's the kind of thing you want). It is also very easy to keep multiple repositries in sync.
I've read that it can be slow for large projects. I don't remember reading the definition of large, but none of my repositories qualify :).
You might also want to check out this comparison or this comparison of revision control systems.
Spoken like someone who has never used version control. Just because he's all on his lonesome isn't a good reason to miss out on all the fun:
With version control I can see the last three times I changed a specific file. I can show the diffs for my latest change at the touch of a button. I can keep seperate branches for release 1.2 and release 2.0. I can merge the bug fixes I apply to version 1.2 into 2.0.
It takes a while to understand the benefits of version control, but once you do, you'll use it for all your development, solo or otherwise.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
I hate to admit it, but for single developer projects Source Safe is actually really handy! It's absolutely pants at handling merging but this shouldn't be much of a problem if there's just one of you or even in a small team of 3 or 4 should you choose to expand the operation.
It keeps track of eveything and allows for easy versioning and comparison between versions. I found it's great if you find new problems cropping up after a certain date and you want to compare what changes you made.
Beware though, it's not much good at anything else so if you want to use multiple branches or get frequent source updates from the client or anywhere else I'd consider something else.