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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All of "big" companies I've worked for use ancient out-of-date source control.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.
"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