The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Subversion hits version 1.0

...so how many CVS users are planning to switch over?

I thnk I'll wait till the debian packages are available and then look into moving over my CVS repositories. I'm really looking forward to directory versioning and renaming support -- I like to rename my files!

Almost Anonymous
Monday, February 23, 2004

I tried convincing my boss to move, but you have to install apache and we're a windows shop. We have no experience with apache.

If only it supported IIS...

RB
Monday, February 23, 2004

So this is a chance for you to gain experience.

Run it on your own machine and see how well it runs. So you've never used it, it'll take you all of 30 minutes to pick it up. Don't be lazy, you're using ignorance as an excuse.

fw
Monday, February 23, 2004

Fairly seriously looking at it -- because it versions directories as well as files, it can handle the renaming tha comes along with refactoring C++.

Plus, for another project, I need a system that will handle moving files fairly frequently.

Katie Lucas
Monday, February 23, 2004

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm not the sys admin. I've got experience with apache, but none of the sys admins have.

Anyway this is off-topic. From what I've read about it, Subversion is a compelling replacement for cvs.

RB
Monday, February 23, 2004

You can have svn without Apache easily. Just like cvs. It's just another option to use WebDAV.

_
Monday, February 23, 2004

OK you can use Subversion without Apache - learn something new everyday - I swear I searched high and low for this info.

http://www.red-bean.com/sussman/svn-anti-fud.html

Cool - now I have a compelling case for using it.

RB
Monday, February 23, 2004

"Subversion is a compelling replacement for cvs."

Hell, MS Source safe is compelling replacement for cvs.

Laurel
Monday, February 23, 2004

Getting SVN working with Apache/WebDAV under windows isn't too difficult. It took me a few hours of screwing around to get it working the first time, but now it seems trivial (like anything Unix-based ;-)

Myron A. Semack
Monday, February 23, 2004

The only compelling about Source Safe is a bullet in the head.

Monday, February 23, 2004

The only thing positive about SourceSafe is that it replaced MS Delta.

Steve Jones (UK)
Monday, February 23, 2004

"but you have to install apache and we're a windows shop. We have no experience with apache."

Incidentally, the fact that you are a Windows shop is completely irrelevant. Apache runs just fine on Windows.

Still boggles my mind how many are willing to accept the security risks posed by IIS when there is a much more acceptable alternative. And I'm not a Linux monkey, either by the way - We're a Windows shop too, but that doesn't mean we leave our server open to the world.

Monday, February 23, 2004

"Still boggles my mind how many are willing to accept the security risks posed by IIS when there is a much more acceptable alternative."

Still boggles my mind how many believe that IIS is a piece of Swiss cheese, whose mere presence means you're 10 seconds from being hacked, as though no hack has ever happened outside of Windows.

Oh, and Apache performs like ass.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, February 23, 2004

Subversion does NOT require the Apache web server! It requires the Apache Portable Runtime (APR). This is just an OS-abstraction library, similar to Netscape/Mozilla's NSPR. I've actually looked into use the APR library for some of my own projects. It's pretty nice, but still under development (like all open source, I guess ;-).

runtime
Monday, February 23, 2004

"Oh, and Apache performs like ass." Brad, that sounds like what a Linuxer would say about Windows. I like the comment though. IIS, Zues and others are a lot better than A-Patchy webserver.

Mike
Monday, February 23, 2004

Curious, with all the bad mouthing I have ever heard about MS Visual SourceSafe (which I have never had to use) that Microsoft has not invested into making major improvements in it. I mean, building a new one from scratch, making radical changes to the existing one or just buying the leader of the pack seems like something they should have done at least in the last three years. MS makes the life of developers easier in so many other ways, this would seem to be a natural extension.

m
Monday, February 23, 2004

Well, the market may be not too interesting to Microsoft and there's already a compelling alternative (that MS might just buy out one day indeed):

http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/

_
Monday, February 23, 2004

Ms ditched VSS long ago in favour of Source Depot (a hot rodded version Perforce). Sinec most claim that Perforce goes like hell, my guess is the kids at MS got a version of Perforce that "goes to eleven" ;)

I want to subvert the company I work for into using Subversion. But I get white knuckled with the thought switching our most valued assets to another system. Our VSS databases are in the "danger will robinson" size of 2.6GB where the DB corrupts itself every hour on the hour and analyze now takes the hours of midnight to 4am to "fix". I will have to suck it up sooner or later i guess. my big fear is that I dont have anyone i can call to "fix it" when i switch over to SVN and muck it up...

As an aside about sourcegear vault is that it's "almost" vss. many things we asked about with the sales reps were "next rev" things. for instance we use the vss journal to identify changes in VSS so that we can run our "lint" to verify compliance on code being checked in. not available in vault. and to go larger that 2GB you need to get real SQL server since MSDE is limited to 2GB out of the box. yikes!

mikester
Monday, February 23, 2004

Hey mikester,

2GB! live a little why don't ya. One of our VSS database has been running at 5.3 GB for the past few months without any corruption - our next branch at the release in a few months will likely have it top out at 7-8 GB.

We have been running VSS for about 4 years without any corruption apart from this one time where a virus managed to get onto the VSS folder. Since then we have increased the security on the VSS folder so only programmers can get at it (probably should have done that in the first place) and we run the verify every couple of months (I know the docs say to do it weekly) but the point is it still runs at 5GB.

Having said all of that, we are still looking at switching source control in the next few months purely because VSS is so slow with 10 people hanging off a 5GB database, and we will most likely be switching to Vault because it offers a virtually nil retraining requirement for our developers.

The other thing is that there is a VSS2004 on the Whidbey disks, but it just appears to VSS6 with XP Themes support - does anybody else know if there are differences between VSS6 and 2004?

Chris Ormerod
Tuesday, February 24, 2004

perhaps once corrupted, always corrupted? How often do you run analyze and when was the last time you ran it?

you should take a look at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvss/html/vssbest.asp

They recommend no bigger than 3-5gb. All I need is a windows binary to subversion to play with and I am gone! now all i need is a good VSS2SVN.cmd and I am out of here ;)

mikester
Tuesday, February 24, 2004

For VSS news there is the occasional stuf on Korby Parnell's WebLog (http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/).

See e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2003/11/03/54250.aspx

Just me (Sir to you)
Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Yeah mikester, that is the doc we found in january - we had already decided to switch because of the speed, but since we found that document we haven't really felt 100% comfortable being nearly 100% over the reccommended db size for VSS.

We analyse once a week like I said (I think I called it verify?) and it hasn't found any errors since that one corruption nearly 3 years ago.

The only "issue" we have with VSS is that because we do VFP alot of our files are binary and occasionaly you will check something in and then do a get latest version and your changes won't be there. This is very rare and we still aren't sure wether it might be user error when it happens.

Chris Ormerod
Tuesday, February 24, 2004

I set up a test machine today with subversion and tortise and it went pretty smooth. using version 0.3.7 because the 1.0 binaries for win arent ready just yet.

i liked what I saw. though the import to SVN is going to be somewhat circuitous. since there are a couple of tools that do VSS to CVS, we will migrate to CVS and then use the CVS to SVN tool :) we have 4 databases on the order of 2GB, and we have some lesser projects in the 400mb range. i hope it goes faster than some of the reported conversion times I saw (one guy was going to take 70 days :)

yes. i could probably write some ruby/shell script to go from VSS direct into SVN but im laaaazy.

mikester
Tuesday, February 24, 2004