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Katie Rocks

2001-06-21 18:13:26+00 by TC 6 comments

This new source control system rocks. stolen from camworld

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Invention and Design ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2001-06-21 20:18:02+00 by: kroah [edit history]

Eeek, you've got to be kidding.
Hm, network goes down and I can't access my source code system.
Doesn't work well for dial-up, internet based, distributed development systems. For something that does handle this, check out BitKeeper. I've been using it for a while and it blows CVS away (also blows SourceSafe, SourceIntregrety, pvcs, and others away too. Perforce is close though.)

Another promising system is SubVersion which looks to handle many of the current issues with cvs. Also it's a "pure" open source license for those who care about those things (although check out the license on BitKeeper. I think it's pretty slick.)

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:56+00 by: Dan Lyke

Hmmm... Tell me more about why you think Perforce blows away CVS. I've played with both a little bit, and it looks like a toss-up between those two, as long as you can impose the discipline necessary to use Perforce in a reasonable way. Of course my limited experience says that's pretty tough to do, so CVS wins based on lack of[Wiki] flexibility.

And yep, I don't think Katie's good for dial-up, internet based distributed development systems, but for a home system, perhaps as a local system to augment CVS (how often have you wanted a version control system with finer granularity than checking into the shared repository?) it sounds well worth a look.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:56+00 by: ziffle

Try FreeVCS. It works well for us. More plus lighter.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:56+00 by: ebradway

Version Control is more a matter of discipline than software. I've seen shops operate just fine by copying the source file to a filename.YYYYMMDD before editting. I've also seen shops put everything and the kitchen sink into a SourceSafe repository.

Large corporate shops have change coordinators whose job it is to make sure the changes are acceptable and get stored in version control at the right level.

I usually don't even bother trying to argue over what software to use because the discipline and procedures are much more important.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:57+00 by: kroah

I don't know Perforce very well at all, I'm going on third party information here (from one of the perl developers who uses it all the time.) I'm taking his word for the fact that Perforce can do things that cvs can't, like handle renamed or moved files sanely, better support for "change set" like bundles.

Personally, over the years of messing with these types of systems, I've found that BitKeeper's representation of change sets works the best. I ran into this idea at an old job that had implemented much the same thing on top of pvcs using awk and ksh (on win16 no less!). Once I got my head around it (bundling changes to different files all made at the same time) it made lots of sense.

And yes, version control is a discipline, but the tool can be used to enforce a type of discipline on the developers that enable them to do their job better (hey, go rip out all of the changes that Joe did with the check-in he made across 5 files yesterday at noon on the -pre4 branch.) and also make the procedures that you need to go through much easier.

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:31:57+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, one of my problems with Perforce is that it lets individual developers in individual check-outs of the source say "oh, and I want this file here and that file over there and these files from different subdirectories here..." and there's suddenly nothing even remotely close to the 

> cvs checkout projectname 
> cd projectname
> ./configure ; ...

That I was really hoping to find.

I haven't had much in the way of sets of changes that a little Perl and some pipe-opens on the CVS client couldn't figure out for me, but there are times when I could see having better systems to manipulate that sort of thing would be cool.