Source Control for the 21st Century
permalinkHaving been using CVS for the last four years in a commercial environment, I’m certainly pretty comfortable with it. Branching and merging is tricky (sometimes painful) as usual, but losing file history on rename is a killer. WinCVS has been the gravy on top that keeps us using CVS. Anyone who might have had the misfortune of trying to work with command-line rcs
or cvs
knows how much more productive a GUI makes things.
I’ve been evaluating alternatives in the next generation of free SCC applications. Given the above issues I’ve had with CVS, my requirements are:
- Supports directory/file renaming with file history saving
- Supports common-ancestor file merging (ie: multiple merges to a branch won’t conflict)
- Has a reasonably good GUI to support 90% of the CLI functionality
My “nice-to-haves” would be:
- Visual Studio integration
- Conflict resolution via “three-file method” (file.mine, file.other, file.ancestor) versus embedded conflict markers (CVS-style
>>>>>>
and<<<<<<
markers) - Easy on-line backup capability (for any SCC system running off a database)
I’m crossing my fingers waiting for Subversion to support the multiple-merge support. It feels like the project with the most elegant and future-proof design. It certainly is a pain to get up and running on some older RedHat distributions (db4 and Apache 2.0 requirements).
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