Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
- Subject: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 13:24:17 -0800
Hi all,
I hope this doesn't kick off a flame war; I know this can be one of
those semi-religious topics. But I'm hoping we can have a civil
discussion about it.
I've used CVS forever, and want to move into something more modern.
I heard from several people I really trust that Perforce is da bomb,
and in my tests it worked just fine. I had occasion to use their
support, and was impressed by how good it was. However, the $800 per
seat cost is pretty steep for a small company, and it seemed clear
from reading both the Xcode and WO lists that there are a lot of
people using Subversion. So I decided to look into that.
After reading through the Manning book on Subversion, I was starting
to have doubts. There were a distressing number of places where the
author seemed to be giving workarounds to limitations in Subversion,
without quite admitting that was what he was doing. I just didn't
feel like I was reading about a polished product, one that would be
so much better than CVS that it would be worth the effort to switch.
However the siren call of "free" was still beckoning me, so I started
monitoring the Subversion user's list.
I don't read all the posts there but from the ones I do read it seems
like a bit of a pattern is emerging. The users there are extremely
protective of their software of choice, and they don't take kindly to
people suggesting improvements. There was recently a knockdown
dragout over whether the "cvs tag" functionality should be added to
Subversion or not. Additionally, it appears that the Subversion
developers are not terribly interested in what the user community
cares about; a good number of the replies on the tags thread could
be boiled down to "Subversion rulez, we don't need no stinkin' tags,
and why are you bothering to argue about this since the developers
don't take requests". It was not a terribly impressive or inspiring
exchange. I've been part of communities like this before and it
seems to me that when the users have a bad attitude they usually
caught it from the developers, and when the developers have a bad
attitude the software ends up suffering.
OTOH, there have been some big splashy conversions to Subversion
lately; Sourceforge is now offering it, among others. So it's not
like the Subversion project is going to fade into petulant obscurity
any time soon, even if they deserved to.
So... any thoughts on why I should (or should not) go with Subversion
or Perforce or something else entirely are all welcome. Also, for
those using Subversion, are you using it through Xcode or with some
other front end? It seems that some of it's limitations can be
solved by using the right client software, but there are so many to
choose from that it's hard to tell which one is the best.
Thanks!
janine
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden