Re: CVS vs VSS
Re: CVS vs VSS
- Subject: Re: CVS vs VSS
- From: Andy Satori <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 11:57:24 -0500
Ok, time to throw my two cents worth into this fray :-)
At work I use SourceGear's SourceOffsite for Visual SourceSafe, I use
it from my Mac :-). SourceGear doesn't speak about it too much, but
thier Unix client does compile and work OS X, and that includes the GTK
based X-Windows GUI client. It's much faster than VSS by itself, and
more importantly, it's not as prone to database corruption as all of
it's file writes are local, and not over a CIFS network connection.
At home, for my personal projects, I just switched to subversion from
cvs, more on that below.
In both cases, I'm working on integrating the command line tools into
XCode myself.
If you look in the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Dev Tools
Core.Framework/Resources/ folder you will find a file named Built-in
SCM Systems.pbscmspec that defines the SCM services that XCode knows
about. If you create an equivalent pbscmspec in your
~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications/ you
will add your custom SCM config to the SCM popup in XCode.
The problem is that that's all the further that the support for 3rd
party SCM's appears to have come in XCode. I haven't been able to find
where to actually configure that defined interface. Once I can define
that interface, with an XCode command -> SCM command %s configuration,
adding 3rd party support will become trivial, and will be a better
answer than the current method that Visual Studio uses to add on for
SCM.
For the moment, I'm simply wrapping SourceOffSite with a shell script
that translates CVS commands into SourceOffSite clc commands. It's a
workable solution until XCOde gives me more flexibility.
The rest of my comments are inserted inline.
On Feb 14, 2004, at 10:04 PM, Chris Hanson wrote:
On Feb 14, 2004, at 9:23 PM, Chuck Soper wrote:
Concerning Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe..
You forgot the part where it (VSS) corrupts your repository at the
drop of a hat, or the part where it's horrendously slow. :)
Hey, I've had that experience, too (corrupting the repository). It
froze integrations for group of twenty-five for three days! MS Visual
SourceSafe might be okay for small groups/projects.
Not really. I've never used it on a project of more than four people.
It was completely inadequate to that task too.
Of course it's inadequate. It's typical Microsoft though, it's just
good enough that it's functional, and since it ships as part of Visual
Studio, it's present on a large percentage of desktops, thus, it's
'cheap' in the mind of a pencil pushing manager.
And what version control tool do you think Microsoft uses? It's a
well known (accepted) industry rumor that MS uses a derivative of
Perforce for huge projects like Windows 2000.
Absolutely. Microsoft doesn't "dogfood" (their term) Visual
SourceSafe. If they don't trust it, why should their customers?
This is actually pretty funny, considering that up until 2000,
Microsoft was IBM's largest AS/400 customer in the world. They didn't
run their business on Windows NT either.
I think the best idea for Apple going forward would be to support a
very generic plug-in API in Xcode that exposes the application's
object model via Objective-C, and lets plug-ins add menus (both to the
various contextual menus and the menu bar). That way there could be a
CVS plug-in, a Perforce plug-in, a Vault plug-in (since I gather Mono
or Rotor will let you run the Vault command-line client)...
Vault is going to run on Mono, but I for one am not sold on it, and I'm
a current user of Source Offsite, and I use their Unix client on Mac OS
X to access the VSS archive at my day job, but I'm not sold on Mono on
OS X yet.
For my personal projects, I've been moving to subversion, and I'm
fairly happy with it. Under normal circumstances, I'd have the same
reservations regarding pre release software as Chris, but in this
instance, I decided that I could live with it. Subversion is an
intelligent implementation, as it leverages WebDAV. And IIRC, the 'V'
in WebDAV stands for 'Versioning'.
Overall, setup is a PITA on the server, but once it's set up, it's
reasonably easy to use, and it's much faster than CVS or VSS (w/ SOS).
The other plus for me is that it runs on a web server, so encrypting
it is simply a matter of adding an SSL certificate to your web server.
The downside is that much like Perforce or the other tools that haven't
been tailored to the Mac OS, it doesn't natively understand NIB's and
bundles. Fortunately, it is open source, so fixing some of those
issues aren't quite as painful as they might be.
Andy
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