Re: Developing with VS2005 over a WAN
- From: Gerry Hickman <gerry666uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:04:19 +0100
Hi Nathan,
That's a useful list of possible problems. How much they will affect how many people I don't know. The corrupt database isn't something I've come across. I've been using the same database since 2003 and even migrated it to a new server. If the database exceeded 4Gb I'd sack the developers for writing bloatware! If the disk got full I'd sack myself for not monitoring it properly. We don't allow merging, only per file. The atomic check-ins and especially branching does sound useful, however.
Nathan Mates wrote:
In article <e3hG37buHHA.4952@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Gerry Hickman <gerry666uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is an utter piece of junk, and seems to
exist only so a checklist on the back of the box can be filled in.
Not sure why you say it's "junk"?
Because it *is*. Here's a short list from the top of my head:
- Corrupts its database at the drop of a hat. Especially if it runs
out of disk space on the server, it just randomly loses data. This is
*NOT COOL*. Databases are also limited to 2 or 4GB each, last time I
used it.
- VSS doesn't do atomic checkins. If someone checks in 20 files into
VSS, and someone does a get at the same time, they can end up with
0-20 of the files that were checked in. So, people end up doing a build,
find that things are broken, and have to do another fetch to see if
it's just a VSS problem. With atomic checkins, then you're guaranteed
that if you get one file in a checkin, you've gotten all.
- VSS's merging of files changed by multiple people is bizarre at best.
When we used VSS here at work, there were lots of times when it just
decided to duplicate a function (or other block of code) twice. Once
again, not cool.
- Lack of any really useful features like branching. Until you've done
this, you rarely understand how *useful* this is. Take a demo or a
release you've got to do next week -- you can copy all code to a new
branch, and do all your work in there. Any changes in either branch
you want to pull over, it's easy. Any changes you want to reject, it's
easy. No more "we're only going to allow approved checkins this week
while we fix a demo" nonsense.
- VSS client UI has its own idea of "standards." Selecting all in the
list is a matter of control-L, because someone decided that control-a
is better used for "add file." Convention be damned, the original
designers just know that people will be adding files far more often
that doing anything useful like select all. In years, MS never once
saw fit to ship multiple keybindings for that client -- it should have
had both "traditional" and "standards-compliant."
- VSS hasn't been updated in the better part of a decade. Everyone
else has gone thru major upgrades in that time. Perforce has per-line
source history in files -- highlight a line of code (or a function),
see who changed it, and when.
- In Perforce, deleting/renaming a file from the depot means that the
next time someone syncs, their local copy of that file does the same
thing. VSS had problems making sure local files got deleted.
- Perforce has both a really useful GUI tool (and optional DevStudio
integration), plus commandline tools that rock. Automated build
processes are really easy to do with perforce -- we monitor checkins,
and kick off builds. If something fails, we generate off emails of who
checked in what. Perforce can even dump off history to a SQL database
if you really want to get fancy with analysis.
That's just a short list I can remember off the top of my head. At
work, we switched from MS Visual SourceSafe to Perforce 2-3 years ago,
and it's been a lifesaver. VSS is fine if you're doing Hello,
World. Any serious development needs to put VSS on the trash heap
where it belongs, and move to something actually usable.
Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/ # Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A. Heinlein
--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)
.
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