http://www.osnews.com/story/7273/Poll_Favorite_Version_Control_System Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:11:47 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i wonder if anyone uses RCS or SCCS still. Its kinda funny since those two were taught in the UNIX class I took when there are more commnly used other ones like CVS. Oh well. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 06:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What about random post it notes all around and telling yourself you remember what you did. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 06:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't use Version Control you insensitive clod! Sat, 05 Jun 2004 06:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I bet the majority who voted here didn't even once used ClearCase (or used a commercial tool). So, how should they know which VCS is the best? This poll should've been for free products. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If people haven't used ClearCase, it probably means that CC is probably too expensive for their pockets. You don't have to have used all 8 VCSes before you vote you know. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I voted for Subversion because it is currently optimum for me wrt. features vs getting-in-the-way.

I like the idea of Arch and I can see it opens up new interesting possibilities, but I think it is way too cumbersome to work with at the moment. Most commands are long and take a million different options. It seems like all the work so far has gone into making sure it works and no work into making it easy to use. That is in itself fine, but in my opinion it is still only for people who like to tinker with stuff like this. If you want work done, your SCM system needs to not get in your way every time you want to do something. I don't think Arch is there quite yet.

Subversion on the other hand is dead easy to use, and for a longtime CVS user the only hard part is typing svn instead of cvs. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? for small projects i'm still happy with plain old cvs (with CVS_RSH=ssh). Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? We were forced to use clear case for about a year (some rational sales rep probably got one of our VPs a nice trip to Hawaii or something), and I can tell you it is the most miserable, over engineered, over complicated pile of junk I have ever seen. 1/2 hour of work just to check in a single file! Before we used source safe, it worked OK, but it has some problems, 1: does not work over internet, and 2: data is stored in a proprietary database that has a tendancy to get mucked up. Now we use CVS, and all I can say, is that is just plain works. You check in files, check out files, and everybody is happy.
with clear case, we had to hire a 'clear case administrator' just to manage the thing, it was so complicated. So anyway, the VP who set us up with clear case left, so did clear case, and every body rejoiced. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OpenCM looks like the most interesting one to me. But I'm not a developer really. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i think one of the most interesting is vesta; taka a look at www.vestasys.org Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "i wonder if anyone uses RCS or SCCS still. Its kinda funny since those two were taught in the UNIX class I took when there are more commnly used other ones like CVS. Oh well."

Sure people do, not so much for programming but RCS still works like a charm on config files.

"I bet the majority who voted here didn't even once used ClearCase (or used a commercial tool). So, how should they know which VCS is the best? This poll should've been for free products."

That was my thought also, CVS and subversion are bound to come out above the expensive systems because nobody's tested all of those. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? RCS is taught in classes because it is a very basic tool for the beginner. Also if you are the only developer on a project, such as a class project, then rcs is really all you need. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 09:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I bet the majority who voted here didn't even once used ClearCase (or used a commercial tool). So, how should they know which VCS is the best?

Sure, the poll was for the favourite (always subjective), not the best (attempts to be absolute) :-P

svn gets my vote - great software, great price, great support.
I have had experience with a commercial VCS, but it was MS SourceSafe, so it kinda doesn't count ;-) Sat, 05 Jun 2004 10:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I voted for darcs (Other): http://abridgegame.org/darcs Sat, 05 Jun 2004 10:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? TeamCoherence anybody? http://www.teamcoherence.com Sat, 05 Jun 2004 10:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I can't vote because I don't use a vcs. I'd like to find out what people think so I can be aided in making a decision. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I really like monotone...

http://venge.net/monotone, course it may not be ready for everyone since it doesn't have any sorta GUI, but that will change in the future Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why is montone not on the list ?

http://www.venge.net/monotone/ Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Dont forget PVCS.. its still one of the most popular commercial offerings, and is probably the most use in the fortune 100 environments such as Boeing, GM, etc. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I work 2.5 year under visual age for java with envy and this repository rocks!

20 persons writing code -> dat file is 800 Mb, no crash, but only java is versionned

sad that there is no support under eclipse, due to costly licence and oti not wanting to continue it Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? PVCS, ClearCase, Continuus, StarTeam, Visual SourceSafe, Perforce, CVS, Subversion, BitKeeper, ...

I've used/tried them all, and my favourite commercial system so far is StarTeam. Among the free systems I'm partial to Subversion which I use at home for my own pet projects. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 12:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Am I struck with temporary blindness or is the "View Results" link missing - in case I don't use any Version Control System but want to know whats used nontheless. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 13:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ArX, a fork of Arch is missing on the list too. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 13:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? We still use SCCS at work. I work for the gov't, so we are way behind the times, lol. It's not too bad though, it works for our purposes. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 14:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://perforce.com Sat, 05 Jun 2004 14:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yeah, Borland's Starteam is the best balanace of ease of use to power. Baseline branching, file status, fast as snot, great GUI.

Not a fan of CVS, pollutes your directory structure with CVS directories (source control should not add files to your source path!) And the GUIs are all junk. Open source hasn't come up with hardly any products with a decent GUI IMO. My guess it's because open source projects are all written by techies, and most people that are that die hard of a techie simply have no visual skills. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 14:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I converted work to subversion a few weeks ago. Linux server and win xp workstations. I will never go back. TortoiseSVN is by far the best way to do versioning i have ever seen. But then again I have never used any commercial tools except VSS, which just plain sucks to say the least. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 15:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm all for subversion, it's just dead simple, fast and it works.
Arch looks nice, but we dont really need its huge featureset at work, and also it wont allow us to work on different directories... Sat, 05 Jun 2004 15:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I can't believe the lack of votes for Perforce. I have to imagine this is due to people never having used it. One week with Perforce and you will realize CVS is unusable for anything other than a single developer.

And before you post an angry response to that, go spend a week with Perforce. It will solve problems you didn't know you had, and make other hassles you thought you had to live with disappear, especially as your team and repository get bigger. That's why so many large software houses use it. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 16:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have never used SVN so my views may be biased but i have read details about SVN. The first thing that did put me off with SVN was that it requires a DB to store your repository.

I have a CVS setup where i can checkout file over internet and work when i am away from home and the repository is only for my personal use. The advantage i get using CVS is that i get all the file system tools to manipulate the repository. I can run sed or awk to manipulate certain things...say license text in all the source code files inside the repository..so on and so forth.

I for sure understand that this kind of control is not needed and in fact not desirable in a production environment where many users access the repository but for personal use i guess CVS is too simple and too easy to handle.

One thing i hate about CVS is that if you want two users to access repository, then you have to give both of them write access to your repository. And this creates security concerns where what if one user wipes out the whole repository?

With tools like clearcase this is not the case at all, because they manage the permissions their self and therefor no need to rely on OS level file system permissions.

- Pankaj
http://www.intellectualheaven.com - home of E_OatBot - A useful chat bot. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 16:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "One thing i hate about CVS is that if you want two users to access repository, then you have to give both of them write access to your repository."

I'm not sure I understod you correctly, but do you mean you can't give one read-only access and the other one write/read access? You better learn to set up CVS then The whole open source world work that way. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 16:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was talking about the scenario where two developers are working on one repository. In that case they both need write access to the depository to check in files.

The problem with this design is that one developer can go and wipe out the whole repository and even the history etc. Yeah you can backup your repository regularly to avoid this situation but still its not a good design.

A better design would always create repository as root user or owner of the repository and the CVS server running will handle client requests, validate them and let them check-in/check-out files. This way only root or owner will have direct access to repository and all the other users will have to access the repository via CVS server, which ofcourse won't allow you to wipe out the repository.

If i am still not clear then please take a look at the mail thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-cvs/2004-02/msg00039.html

-Pankaj
http://www.intellectualheaven.com - Home of E_OatBot - A useful yahoo chat bot Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I have never used SVN so my views may be biased but i have read details about SVN. The first thing that did put me off with SVN was that it requires a DB to store your repository. "

the cvs version has already made this optional. the next release will probably have it the way you want. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "I was talking about the scenario where two developers are working on one repository. In that case they both need write access to the depository to check in files. "

http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/sshcvs/ Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Voted other here. Not affiliated with them, but I've found Code Co-Op (http:://relisoft.com/) to be quite nice for private use. Relatively inexpensive, nice feature set, works well with small groups, and a group of developers more than willing to take suggestions and offer support. It's what I ended up purchasing for home use. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 18:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I voted for Perforce. I moved to it after having used CVS for years. Aside from having to write a script to convert CVSNT repository files back to plain CVS format (which I'll be releasing soon), it is going well.

I disagree with the comment that CVS is suitable for single developers, that's where Perforce is great as it is effectively free for up to two developers :-) I use it at work and I'm (currently) the only one using it. Once the other developers get up to speed I could see us buying a few licenses.

Its easy to install (one executable for the daemon, one for the UI, and one for the web interface, on OSX anyway), easy to use (no config files needed), and it has several basic things that CVS misses, like support for renaming files.

Go take a look!

Damien Sat, 05 Jun 2004 18:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's like Arch. But good.

Darcs: http://abridgegame.org/darcs Sat, 05 Jun 2004 19:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You can have the repository owned by root or a cvs pseudo user and assign permissions for individual groups on sections of the cvs tree. Permissions can be as fine grained as you want them. I do admit, however, that it's not perfect. Then again, what is?

The freebsd project has it's entire tree in cvs (though Preforce is used for experimental code prior to import into the main cvs repository), and we certianly have more than a single developer working on it. These concerns over multiple users being able wipe out the repository are unfounded.

I don't know what the deal was with the comment about cvs polluting your home directory with files. Don't use your home directory as your cvs root. What do you mean it adds files to your source path? Sat, 05 Jun 2004 19:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >"I have never used SVN so my views may be biased but i have
>read details about SVN. The first thing that did put me off
>with SVN was that it requires a DB to store your repository
Sure, but it's Berkeley DB. Stores the repository in a few DB files. Not some SQL server like MySQL/Postgres. You usually
don't need to care much about the db svn uses, it takes care of everything for you. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 21:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I used CVS for years. Then our company switched to Perforce. At first, everyone hated it, but now, many people groan if they have to use CVS or WinCVS. Perforce has an outstanding UI -- far and away better than WinCVS or TortiseCVS. Our productivity has gone up since we switched. And Perforce is a fairly cheap commercial option. It's not that CVS is bad, but Perforce is much better.

I once tried BitKeeper, and very much liked the idea of tree-based development. But my company won't switch, and for personal use, I'd rather stick with OSS. Maybe arch/darcs/monotone/etc. will fill in the gap some day, but I'm not holding my breath.

Subversion is better than CVS, and has the most potential to win over CVS users. But the GUIs are still not as good as for Perforce. That may change in time.

I'm pretty sick of the arch people who keep ragging on subversion. They need to grow up, improve their product, and then persuade users to switch.

Oh well, it's good that there are so many choices, and that they're all improving. Competition is good. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I am using NGSource v3 from www.ngsource.com
and I have to say it is outstanding tool. I did use
cvs, pvsc, clearcase and vss.
NG works for me the best.

Robert Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? By adding files to the source directory, I think he meant that working directories for both cvs and svn have either "CVS" or ".svn" directories added to them to keep track of things. This is usually not a problem, but it can sometimes be annoying. Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > I think he meant that working directories for both cvs and svn have either "CVS" or ".svn" directories added to them to keep track of things.

Would a user-wide database (e.g. ~/.svn) of all working copies be better? Sat, 05 Jun 2004 23:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > Would a user-wide database (e.g. ~/.svn) of all working copies be better?

In some cases, yes. I think this how Perforce and svk handle things. You give up the convenience of being able to move working directories at whim, but you also don't confuse tools that don't expect to find those extra directories (e.g., Interface Builder on Mac OS X had a problem with .svn directories for a while, but it's been fixed now). Sun, 06 Jun 2004 04:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you use cvs, you still use rcs. Brother, is it all a black art to folks these days? I just yesterday converted my rcs repository to cvs - hard to do, copy the directories into the cvs tree and start using them... Sun, 06 Jun 2004 12:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does yelling you're working on something loudly to the rest of the bullpen count as, "other"? Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does anyone know if it is possible to install a Subversion client on OpenVMS? I love Subversion, but need to be able to pull repositories to OpenVMS. I am having a hard time finding any information regarding this combination of OS & CVS....

Any help is appreciated... Mon, 07 Jun 2004 02:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments