Re: Thoughts on choosing a source code control system?
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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