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Re: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
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Re: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?


  • Subject: Re: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
  • From: Arturo Pérez <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:33:34 -0500

Well, Ian, that's certainly radical. I must say that I would really feel must comfortable having a SCS handy as I like to make lots of small revisions.

My personal process is make revisions, get to a stable (but not necessarily bug-free) point and do a backup. I prefer to use an SCS for backup as the tools are mostly engineered with that in mind. But a plain backup would probably work well, too.

The only OS I know of that supported that nicely is VMS but even it only supports 32,000 versions of a file :-)

-arturo

On Mar 12, 2006, at 8:08 PM, Ian Joyner wrote:

Now what are your real requirements? I'll throw in another thought for you – don't bother with an SCS at all! For small companies and small projects they really are not necessary and add so much overhead that you almost have to employ an expert to get whichever one you choose working.

Rather than wasting such resources, the money is better spent on someone who really understands software structure will get your class structure right and develop neat programs. Perhaps once that is right, an SCS might help, but too often the reverse is the case and an SCS is used to help manage a mess of a software system.

Of course, this comment might start off the real religious war since the process and methodology people don't like the real truth to be known that they are really just hiding behind their tools ("the project failed, but don't blame us we did everything right according to some misguided book"). Since I don't know the real structure of your company or development team I can't really comment, but I can only say that SCS systems are not necessarily a mandatory part of the development process, and it is worth thinking about, since none of these tools seem to be without their problems (which you must expend energy and resources to solve).

(Oh yeah and be wary of the marketing pitch of these methodologies that says you are obviously a hacker if you are not using this or that tool. They know how to make people feel inferior if they are not using them and of course can go straight to management, who will fall for the pitch. Goes back to the SA/SD days and probably further, but I know even Larry Constantine who wrote the book with Yourdon woke up to that one and moved on.)

OK, I'm going back to reading "Object-Oriented Software Construction" now.

Ian

On 12/03/2006, at 8:24 AM, email@hidden wrote:

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

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 >Thoughts on choosing a source code control system? (From: email@hidden)
 >Re: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system? (From: Ian Joyner <email@hidden>)

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