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An Illustrated Version Control Timeline
rocket22 writes "Most software developers are supposed to be using the latest in tech and see themselves as living on the edge of software innovation. But, are they aware of how old some of the tools they use on a daily basis are? There are teams out there developing iPad software and checking in code inside arcane CVS repositories. Aren't we in the 21st century, the age of distributed version control? The blog post goes through some of the most important version control systems on the last three decades and while it doesn't try to come up with an extremely detailed thesis, it does a good job creating a catalog of some of the most widely spread or technologically relevant SCMs."
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All of "big" companies I've worked for use ancient out-of-date source control. The first one used VSS (late 90's, so it wasn't so unusual at the time) but then around 2000 moved to PVCS. All the developers assumed that someone got kickbacks because there's no reason to move to an older, more expensive, inferior product. Now I work at a Fortune 500 company that also uses PVCS. Their reason: not a soul in the building has ever used anything else. I explain about the features of modern source control and people look at with with either marvel (it can do that!!??), or disdain (how dare you question my source control system).
I don't know why this one piece of software evokes such illogical responses. Oh well.
Linus is not a god and not everything he says should be taken as gospel. He gets a LOT of things wrong. Put down the cool-aid. :-)
Hey, I'm successful and independently wealthy too, and I like CVS. Quote that! :-) Now, I admit that I haven't extensively used most of the tools in the "article", but I haven't needed what they offer above and beyond CVS.
As for the cell-phone analogy in the "article", I still use a Qualcomm QCP-1900 cell-phone from 1998 and, surprise, it still manages to work great as a phone. Paid $200 for it outright (no contract), which works out to $16 a year and still have a $15/month no-contract account. I only need it to make phone calls. Sometimes, it pays to stick with what you have and what works...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"If it ain't broken, don't fix it."
Right. And CVS is horribly broken. So it's been fixed. :P
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
But does it work for them? If so, great! Why switch to something else if you have no real need for all those features?
It's not just about features, CVS is deeply broken (tagging/branching, directories, binary files, metadata, etc). Subversion is a drop-in replacement that fixes (most) of the problems and can be used in exactly the same workflow. The two are equivalent and one is less broken - it's kind of a no-brainer.
sic transit gloria mundi
DVCS can use the exact same workflow as non-distributed VCS, and they're faster in many cases - including not having to connect to a central server for each and every commit.
If it costs you to change now, don't, but if you're starting a new project, I see no reason to choose CVS.
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I too have used Subversion since it was in pre-release (0.8) I think. When I started doing research on Source control, my managers said "Use VSS". I disliked MS at the time and still doo and thus avoided that path. I came across the thesis by the author of RCS (great read) and researched about RCS, PVCS, CVS and SVN. SVN was a dream come true when I saw it. Tortoise SVN was the icing on the cake. I have since continued to use SVN and have converted many others to SVN away from VSS and other tools. I love SVN still and use it daily and will not be switching any time soon.
Regarding the post, I don't really like hearing is that "All major open source projects" are moving away from SVN. Sorry but there are many still using SVN and will continue to do so. For instance FreeBSD, which is a huge project, who are still using SVN today. Also, saying that SVN is wrong is wrong. SVN is wrong for some groups but very right for others.
Also, people are constantly mis-reading Linus's comments on SVN. Linus was just dissing SVN for his uses and was tired of the evangelical SVNers nagging him to use it. I appreciate that his code models are different and require different SCM tools and that a SVN centralized model does not work. But this does not mean that SVN is wrong for everyone.
SVN is valid for many groups, teams, around the world and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
- JsD
And another point: "the age of distributed version control"?
I work in an office. I have a gigabit network between my workstation and the version control server, which runs on a RAID array significantly faster than the disks under my desk. The connection is always on, always works, and is so fast I don't notice it. In what way could I possibly benefit from a distributed system? And why would I use a distributed system when every one I've ever tried requires a two-step approach to sending my changes to the other developers (synchronize my working copy with the local version control, push changes from local to the rest of the team) rather than just one (commit changes)?