Version Control System Comparison

Version Control System Comparison. Why moving to CVS in your organization/project may not be the best idea: Atomic commits - CVS doesn’t have this. Renaming support - CVS doesn’t have this (there are ways to hack around this, but you will lose revision history). There are better choices out there.

Sidenote: I’ve been posting quite a few “Asides” recently. On my todo list is to offer an RSS feed without these “Asides” posts.

7 Comments & TrackBacks ()

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Nathan's Gravatar

What are some alternatives you suggest? I have looked at subversion, but I really only want a local, single-user versioning system.

Posted by: Nathan on November 6, 2004 1pm

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Tom Sommer's weblog's Gravatar

Version Control System Comparison
Redemption in a Blog has an interesting link to a Version Control System Comparison.
Serendipity is currently considering moving away from CVS and SourceForge. Honestly I find CVS lacking in many areas and the Sourceforge CVS is painfully slow and 24 ho

Posted by: Tom Sommer's weblog on November 6, 2004 11pm

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wakalulu's Gravatar

Well, there are a lot going for CVS:

1. It’s free. You can’t beat this one.
2. It’s proven. Countless Open Source projects uses it.
3. It’s limitations are well known. This may seem weird to be a great strength for CVS, but the fact that limitations are well known means that:
- someone else would have already find a workaround
- you can plan your development practice around the limitation
Unless you are working on a one man project, you really don’t want to fool around with the configuration management system that doesn’t have a proven track record.
4. It’s beats SourceSafe hands-legs-toes down. And you’ve got to pay for it!

Depending on your methodology, there’s always great alternatives - I personally love Perforce, and there are many serious software development companies swear by ClearCase. But when CVS it’s free, it’s very easy to be easy on its shortcomings.

Posted by: wakalulu on November 7, 2004 1am

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Roshambo's Gravatar

I’m a major fan of Subversion, and a major critic of CVS. The main problem with CVS is the way people tend to twist themselves and their coding practices to accomidate it.
Subversion, made by the same guys who made CVS, attempts to fix this, and does a relatively good job at it. Plus, it’s still free–and yes, you can’t beat that.

And it runs as an Apache module–what else could a geek ask for?

Posted by: Roshambo on November 7, 2004 3am

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Michel's Gravatar

If you use Windows 2000/XP, you can try CVSNT, a WIN32 version of CVS which has atomic commits, file renaming, and a host of other improvements. As a CVS server, it’s compatible with the normal CVS clients, and as a client with normal CVS servers. Worth trying. (Apparently it’s also been backported to Unix.)

Posted by: Michel on November 7, 2004 2pm

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boy will chair unconditionally's Gravatar

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Posted by: boy will chair unconditionally on May 30, 2006 1am

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Bill Johnson's Gravatar

CVS is Crap!
After 2 days troubleshooting why it hangs,
it suddenly works this trace logging option -t turn on.

That means it’s internal multi threaded, concurrency,
is architecturally flawed. After years of rework,
its internal architecture is seriously flawed.
CVS is Crap!

Posted by: Bill Johnson on November 30, 2007 4am

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