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?"

Comments

Re:Subversion

[lightspawn]

Sorry, I guess I should have explained. It's easy to set up - pretty straightforward if you only want to use it locally - it's as easy as

svnadmin create dbname

A huge plus is it's easy to export/import the database to a single (large) file, so you can actually see it does what it's supposed to.

It's written by the people who used to maintain CVS before noticing how annoying it was.

So it's not overkill, and satisfies all of your criteria.

or cvs

[akookieone]

I like subversion as well, and its a good time to jump on that band-wagon as the product is mature enough now you shouldn't have to work very hard to defend its use over other older/established tech.(If it were up to me entirely, this is what I would use.)

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.

The obvious recommendation is CVS

[ObviousGuy]

As everyone else around here attests to, CVS is the obvious choice.

But my question is what kind of company is it that can't afford to pay for business software? As this kind of thing can be deducted from taxes, it makes a lot of sense to let the company pay for the software and enjoy the tax relief.

Even if the company is just you, it would be better to let the corporation pay for it and not pay full price on the software out of your salary.

Charge your next customer a little more and use the difference to pay for some software. Of course it makes sense to use free software whenever possible, but I can't imagine agreeing to being taken advantage of by a company like you are describing.

Perforce

[Bronster]

I'd definitely recommend Perforce as well, but it's not free. Of course, as a single user you can use the 2 users/2 workspaces design supported without a licence.

Believe me, you'll be happier than with the current crop of free stuff (though I'd be tempted by Subversion if it didn't depend on so many things just because they're the latest cool thing).

Perforce is nice on Linux too in that it's just a couple of statically compiled binaries that work everywhere. Pleasant change to dependency hell (like getting any recent piece of software onto Debian stable)

Re:Perforce

[markhb]

I believe you're confusing two separate issues. The agreement relating to "no production use" is the evaluation, where you can have them give you a limited-time license key for n users to evaluate the software. The 2-user, 2-workspace configuration is gratis:

You can download and use any Perforce software product free. All Perforce software you download is fully functional, with the exception of the Perforce Server, which allows only two users and two client workspaces when used without a license.

That is from the page you referenced. Also, from http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html,

You may use software downloaded from Perforce for any purpose you want and for as long as you like. The Perforce Server supports only two users and two client workspaces unless used with a Perforce License.

As far as I have been able to tell, there is no restriction against using the 2-user version in production. If you have an example of such a restiction, please post it.

subversion is easy to use

[Adhoc]

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

Re:CVS

[Arkham]

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.

Re:CVS

[smallfries]

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.

Tortoise SVN

[manonthespoon]

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.

Re:Tortoise SVN

[nick_danger]

Definitely Tortoise w/subversion.

I'm using it in a very similar situation: I'm the sole developer for a Windows based Delphi application. I've found it to be VERY easy to use; it supports branches/version snapshots/etc, it's fast, and it easily supports binaries as well as text. Tortoise integrates into the Windows explorer, providing icon overlays in the tree view and the file view indicating the status of tracked files and a bunch of other things. No need to pull up the DOS penalty box to issue commands -- it's all there. It's really sweet.

How about Darcs?

[Wonko]

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.

Re:Source Safe

[rrsipov]

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.

Re:Winzip

[PylonHead]

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.

TortoiseSVN in local repository mode...

[zhiwenchong]

... 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."

Re:What revision control system does MS use?

[RomSteady]

Internally, Microsoft uses Source Depot, which seems to be a source-modified version of Perforce.

It has some additional features that Perforce lacks for doing per-checkin builds and acceptance tests.