Anyone out there have any experience with Version control software? We're looking for something to run here at the office.. there's only a handful of us, so cost is definitely a factor.. windows based software with a frontend is a must. Any thoughts?
We've been using Tortoise CVS here at the Louisiana Virtual School for about a year. I'm not the one who handles the more technical behind-the-scenes stuff, so I don't know that I'd be able to answer all of your questions, but it's worked beautifully for us so far.
We use CVS at work and are switching over to Subversion which is free alos. I would recommend looking at something other than CVS (and RCS). It's rather outdated and there's some issues with it I just don't like. I would imagine someone has made a windows GUI for Subversion.
You get what you pay for. What kind of money do you intend to spend for maintenance and support? What kind of infrastructure do you have to make backups of your repositories? If that's set up, you could potentially use an open-source solution and do this for free--or more appropriately, for the cost of backups. We use CVS, which integrates with most IDE's, including the ones that we use. Our repositories are on UNIX servers that are backed up regularly. We have flavors of CVS for UNIX, Windows, and DOS environments. We use "ant" for build automation. Our Windows client is WinCVS. But as I said, you get what you pay for. You break it, you fix it--or find someone on the net who has already fixed it. And *always* have backups of your repositories. By the way, just checking Keith's response, I've heard good things about Subversion, too. I'll have to check that out. (I'm the SCM guy at work.) - Steve
Real men use Clearcase! You won't hear good things about it, though. Its strength is that you can create a build in which you've selected a particular version (possibly a previous or branched version) of every individual file or directory... good for LARGE projects. Its weakness? Your company will need a whole department just to manage Clearcase itself...
Then I guess was once a real man, Mark. I was the ClearCase guy until the developers said that they wanted to use CVS. I've had classes and a few years of experience. Some of it was good. A lot of it was bad. ClearCase is powerful, but with that power comes overhead and cost (and we're talking $$$$$ or more initially, and $$$ a seat for license renewals). And ClearCase is the only product I've used where a repository has gone missing and I've had to spend hours on the phone with tech support to recover it. I'm sure it's better now. It would have to be. By the way, this is what I meant by "You get what you pay for." When the repository went goodbye, I had a toll-free number to call on a 24/7 basis and someone to help me. You would not get this with plain-jane CVS. - Steve
We use CVS at my work where we do development on both Linux and Windows. Some use the graphical interface available on Windows. To make the usage of CVS more robust, our tools team have created a robust wrapper around CVS that allows for better control of the versioning, branching and componentizing our product. It makes for easier tagging, merging and the like. The wrapper is done in perl and we have to use a shell interface, but it works for us developers that are into the whole command line interface
