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I'm used to using subversion with tortoisesvn with other development teams and found it very useful. My current development team uses MS Sourcesafe which I believe is a load of....well you get the point! Am I right in thinking that subversion with toirtoisesvn is now the standard for modern version control as opposed to source safe?

Thanks

Funky
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3 Answers3

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Even Microsoft developers refused to use VSS. Frankly, I didn't think anyone in the world still used that flaming ball of .... SVN was decent, as a replacement for CVS anyway. But if your evaluating current SCM solutions then do yourself a service and leave it out of the mix. I would recommend looking at the following 'open-source' offerings:

  • Git (my personal favorite).
  • [Mercurial (another nice one, similar to Git)
  • Bazaar (was picking up speed at some point, but blown out of the water by the above two options, in my opinion)

Some commercial offerings:

  • Perforce (one of the better commercial SCM's)
  • Team Foundation Server (if you were using VSS, then this is the logical commercial 'successor'. Not without its own problems though)
  • Borland StarTeam (Nice GUI, though its handling of deletes is horrible)
Perception
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  • I don't think there's a punishment severe enough for mentioning StarTeam as an alternative to anything. – Roman Jul 16 '12 at 03:19
  • @R0MANARMY - please provide some background to justify that highly technical assertion. – Perception Jul 16 '12 at 10:09
  • Looking around SO, branching/merging in the system seems to [scare some people](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1410722/do-you-feel-comfortable-merging-code) and it really shouldn't. Command line tools don't seem to have a concept for *log in* so commands need to be [prefixed with username/password](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2198825/how-to-get-the-labeled-code-from-starteamstcmd-exe) which makes automation awkward... – Roman Jul 16 '12 at 19:11
  • ... To further make automation awkward, they don't appear to have 64 bit versions of [some of their binaries](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5163763/how-to-configure-jenkins-starteam-plugin). Also, having to work with it for the past year, the UI is pretty clunky to use and has terrible multi-monitor support (right click menus pop up on wrong monitor). Versioning is done at the file level rater than a changeset level so it's hard to figure out which files were changed as part of a particular commit and to then roll back those changes. – Roman Jul 16 '12 at 19:15
  • ... IDE integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse technically exists but (at least the visual studio part) isn't very good. Integration with third party tools is also very week (I have yet to find third party issue tracking software that integrates with StarTeam for example). There also appears to be no standard way of exporting your data out of it to import into another source control system if you wanted to so once you commit to StarTeam you are basically trapped. – Roman Jul 16 '12 at 19:20
  • StarTeam is a proprietary, visual SCM that predates modern tools like Git. It seems like you've had some personal issues with it but I see nothing in your list that would warrant its exclusion from my original list. It's Java API' are pretty robust and 64 bit versions of them are available since (2009?). It has good branching, merging, labelling, tagging, and issue tracking. My real solid gripe with it is the way it handles deletes (hard to track history, can cause phantom tracking in downstream clients). – Perception Jul 17 '12 at 19:57
  • And of course, the whole concept of centralized repositories is quite outdated. But for a visual SCM its not as horrendous as you make it out to be. – Perception Jul 17 '12 at 19:57
  • We can agree to disagree on whether issues I listed are personal or more objective. As far as why exclude it, because I feel like it hasn't kept up in terms of features and usability with other more modern systems. If you wouldn't use it yourself, I don't think it's fair to recommend it to others. – Roman Jul 18 '12 at 01:16
  • I wouldn't use any of the commercial offerings I listed, not in this day and age. But there are thousands of developers happily using TFS. Far be it from me to attempt to cram the one choice down anyone's throat. – Perception Jul 18 '12 at 02:57
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Visual Source Safe is very very old and aged. And very very far for what you'd expect today from a source versionning system.

CVS isn't really younger but was probably more modern in its idea, and didn't ask you to lock files for examples.

Subversion, which is now aged too, was meant as a replacement of this very old generation.

Now the young systems are Mercurial and Git.

Denys Séguret
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That is a very subjective question.

But, the answer is 'Yes'... yes it is an old technology based on its release date and maintenance schedule.

TFS is the newer Microsoft alternative to VSS.

Sheldon Warkentin
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