Re: Source Control Comparison

wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 04/22/2005 12:48:28 PM:

> I spoke to my manager about installing subversion on our system so I 
could 
> test it out, but he said that he would still like for me to research VSS 
(MS 
> Visual Source Safe). So this sort of leads to my question. Has anyone 
worked 
> with VSS in WDSc? I know there is a plugin, but it still requires the 
client 
> to be installed (and purchased). How easy and stable is this plugin?

You will not have to search very hard to find a number of VSS horror 
stories, mainly revolving around corrupt and unrecoverable databases.  It 
is also pretty slow and insecure.  Microsoft is coming out with a new 
product called Team System 2005.  It looks pretty good but it is 
incredibly expensive and is obviously completely MS-centric.  VSS will 
still exist but they didn't start over for no reason.  If you are going to 
look at the commercial Windows-centric tools you ought to at least look at 
the others like Serena's Version Manager, MKS' Source Integrity or 
Perforce.  They all provide everything that VSS does and have better 
reputations for stability and features.

> Also, out of CVS, subversion, and VSS, which do you find is the easiest 
to 
> understand and use? The biggest reason for the push to VSS is that our 
web 
> developers use mostly .NET and Visual Studio I consider myself a 
beginner 
> and am still learning about source control. I am reading about 
subversion in 
> the free subversion book right now. So, I am still trying to figure out 
> branching and stuff like that. 

I have used all of the products mentioned thus far and for whatever reason 
I find Subversion to be by far the easiest to understand.  I just find 
it's metaphor of a virtual filesystem real easy to understand.  That is 
not even getting into all of the features it provides that the others do 
not. 

You could probably go your whole career without needing to do branching, 
depending of course on how you do development.  I never understood or was 
comfortable with branching in those tools.  With Subversion I just find it 
really easy to grasp how it works and now I use it all of the time. 

There is nothing about any of these products that preclude you from using 
.NET or VS so I do not really see how that enters into this.

For me, I would consider being able to run my "server" under OS/400 to be 
a big bonus of Subversion.  You get your iSeries reliability not to 
mention just the ease of management for things like backup and recovery. 
Using Apache as the basis for the server (as Subversion can) also lets you 
tap into all of Apache's authentication and security features.  We have 
ours validate against our MS Active Directory, but it could just as easily 
be our OS/400 profiles or a Validation List object.

> Also, I do mostly RPG work. I make heavy use of projects in WDSc for a 
few 
> reasons, one of which is because I can sync to a CVS server I have 
setup. 
> What advantages is there using something more designed for RPG? I know 
this 
> opens the door more for the vendors to contact me, but I will still pose 
the 
> question. Mark, feel free to contact me offline :-).

While you are of course free to copy your RPG source to stream files and 
then store them in a version control tool, I do not view that as a 
practical solution.  The rest of the tools you need to make this work just 
are not there.  The closest you can come is to load all of your source 
into an iSeries Project in WDSC and then store that in version control. 
The problem is that the iSeries Projects feature was not designed for that 
purpose and doesn't handle it well.  It was meant to contain just the 
source you are working on to complete a particular project, and then move 
on to the next one.  This would be your best bet, but I do not really see 
it working.  You still have to deal with issues like how do you know 
someone didn't change the source on the iSeries.

Of course you would also be missing all of the build, promotion and 
deployment features that the iSeries CM tools provide.

Mark

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