Comments on: All About Subversion

By: Pavel Ivashkov

Pavel Ivashkov — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:49:48 +0000

Just to be honest: we use SourceSafe in multiple checkouts mode for a two years now in small (three to four person) but highly active projects. (VS2003 and VS2005 IDEs) Merging feature works fine with no issues to implementation. We use VSS for local projects only, for distributed projects we use Subversion, but not pleased with currently available SVN to IDE integration products.

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:37:01 +0000

Excellent, thanks for the post and good luck!

By: John J. Felczak

John J. Felczak — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:20:54 +0000

I’ve been involved in experiments with allowing multiple checkouts (i.e., non-locking mode) in Visual SourceSafe at several previous employers.

Biggest problem is that VSS is *supposed* to automatically merge the multiple checkouts at checkin time and present the “Visual Merge” interface for any conflicts it can’t resolve.

In reality this never seems to happen. What you get instead is “last one in wins”, i.e., last checkin overwrites all changes from the earlier ones. Every time we tried this we imediately went back to lock mode, because it just simply wasn’t working.

I definitely would *not* recommend using VSS in this way. Works much better in lock mode if you can live with and work within this limitation. If you want multiple simultaneous checkouts of the same file and sophisticated branching and merging capabilities, Perforce works much better. Sure it costs money, but so does VSS if you license it legitimately.

I’m looking into SVN right now as a replacement for CVS. Hopefully it will give us similar capabilities in an open-source product.

By: Fyodor Sheremetyev

Fyodor Sheremetyev — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:46:17 +0000

There is a new Subversion plugin for VisualStudio 2003 & 2005 - VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com). Lightweight and reliable. Have a look at it :)

By: Chris Whelan

Chris Whelan — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:58:13 +0000

With regard to using the cvs locking; I think that more people use it or would like to use it than some would think. We have certain types of regularly changed and heavily modified files that are painful to merge and we would rather lock; e.g. html, jsp and some of our javascript files. It is not a lot of fun to be the person stuck merging them as I can attest from personal experience…

By: Maniac

Maniac — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 17:06:00 +0000

besides ‘browsing’ your repository via apache, you can also make use of apache’s built in access control mechanisms! If you want to tunnel via ssh subversion supports that too. I’ve been using it for months and am very happy with it.

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:13:50 +0000

Thanks for the info, but heck, riding underwater is a supported use case for a bicycle; doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Does anybody really use cvs in locking mode?

By: Jim White

Jim White — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 22:43:09 +0000

It’s an equally common misconception about CVS.

CVS also supports locking but it is off by default. See ‘cvs admin -l’. Reserved checkouts can be implemented using it through a wrapper.

http://www.gnu.org/manual/cvs-1.9/html_mono/cvs.html#SEC92

By: Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 16:06:56 +0000

Yechhhh, does anybody actually use it that way? What’s the user experience for merge collisions?

There are still plenty of reasons for SourceSafe to suck even if it has a lockless mode, I gotta say.

By: Zilch

Zilch — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 14:48:39 +0000

This is a common misconception about SourceSafe.

Locking is optional in SourceSafe (on by default). When you check out a file, you can tick “Allow multiple checkouts”, and hordes of people can work on the same file! Better yet, if you dislike locking, you can let multiple checkouts be the default via the SS admin interface.