The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Any problems with Tortoise CVS?

Any problems with Tortoise CVS?

Hi,

After 9 years as a profitable commercial software company, I figured it was time to implement CVS of some sort.

I've tried a few (perforce, Subversion, Tortoise CVS).

T*CVS seems the easiest to use. Very intuitive, good integration with the Windows Explorer, etc.

I want something simple. I do all of our programming, so there's no need for much fancy stuff, although I'd like the *option* to someday expand to 2+ programmers.

I know that SubVersion was written to deal with "problems" with the old CVS. I assume T*CVS uses CVS. So, thought I'd ask if people had problems with T*CVS.

Mr. Analogy
Monday, March 29, 2004

Subversion and CVS are servers

TortoiseCVS is a Windows client for CVS. Instead of controlling CVS from your IDE you do it from your windows client.

Are you sure you do all your programming?

RP
Monday, March 29, 2004

* If your repository is CVS then use TortoiseCVS.
* If you use Subversion, then use the TortoiseSVN client.

Duncan Smart
Monday, March 29, 2004

I've been using the Tortoise CVS client for a couple of years along with the Windows CVS server. No problems, but I just do basic check-in & check-out.

Monday, March 29, 2004

For some reason, in order to use Tortoise CVS, I had to write a program to pretend to be CVS and reformat one of the parameters Tortoise sends to CVS. (one that had to do with the temp directory, I think) And yet, no one else seems to have ever had this problem, at least that I can find online. After that, it works great most of the time. Once in a while it seems to hang. I like having it set so that if anything in a folder is changed, the parent folders all show the changed icon. That way I can quickly see where all of the changes have been made.

I still have WinCVS around. I think there are a few things that Tortoise doesn't do.

Keith Wright
Monday, March 29, 2004

The only complaint I've got with Tortoise is that it doesn't work on removable or network sandboxes. And that's more a complaint about Windows Explorer rather than Tortoise.

(Yes, I know you can turn off the checkbox and get this working, but it's an invitation to locking up, unfortunately.)

Chris Tavares
Monday, March 29, 2004

BTW, as long as you're the only one checking code in/out, you can use TortoiseCVS stand-alone, ie. no need to set up a CVS server to stand between the client and the data.

Fred
Monday, March 29, 2004

I used the Tortoise client with CVS and then more recently we're using it with SVN and both versions work great. If you go with CVS as your back end (though really Subversion is much better) there is an alternate set of icons floating around that it much better than the ones that come in the download. If you need them let me know I can send them to you.

--Josh

JWA
Monday, March 29, 2004

We use Tortoise CVS as a client and it's great.

The only problem we are having with the system (not sure if it is a client or server problem) is that very rarely a file doesn't get updated.

You choose 'CVS Update' from the menu and it appears to go OK, but the file doesn't change. It looks green in explorer but is definitely an old version. Repeated updates on the file don't change anything

We've seen this at least twice, and the workaround is to delete the file locally and update the directory.

If this is a known problem I'd love to have a solution. It is worrying not being able to trust your source code control system to do the right thing.

Rob Walker
Monday, March 29, 2004

Rob: This is a "works as advertised" thing.

Add the CVS columns (right click on the column header in Explorer, bring up the complete list, and add the CVS ones). You'll notice that 'stuck' files have a "sticky version".

This happens when you fetch a _specific_ version, either a branch, a tag or simply an old revision. Once you do that, CVS will keep the file to that version, which is very useful for branches, but only rarely useful for anything else.

To release the stick tag, use "CVS Update Special", and choose "Return to HEAD".

Ori Berger
Monday, March 29, 2004

Last week I tried to set up Tortoise with CVSNT as the server. It was pretty difficult to get up and running. You have to follow the install instructions very precisely. Even then it took some doing. Probably would have been less painful if I knew more about CVS.

Now that it's up and running, I'm pretty happy with it.

Lee
Monday, March 29, 2004

Been running WINCVS ant TortoiseCVS for over a year.
So far so good.
Installed Subversion last week
will be testing it this week

Nicholas Franks
Monday, March 29, 2004

Another CVS option might be the Zeus SCC-SVS:

http://www.zeusedit.com/archives/scccvs.html

This is a free Microsoft SCC wrapper for CVS which means it should (in theory) work with any SCC compliant IDE.

It was originally tested in house against MSVC++ 5,0 and an early version of CodeWrite, but the more recent release are only tested against the Zeus editor.

There have also been several reports from users that it also works with PowerBuilder, so the SCC implementation does appear to be SCC compliant.

Jussi
Monday, March 29, 2004