Perforce vs Subversion
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May be this topic has been beaten to death several times.:~ If so, please pass the links to those discussions. We are looking to replace VSS with either one. Any pros and cons list comparison of both. I googled and found several comparisons. It appears most of the comparison are one sided.:rolleyes: Do you use one or both? what is your take on either one? Thanks for your thoughts.
/* I can C */ // and !C Yusuf
We switched over to perforce from a homegrown solution 8 years ago and have never looked back. It met our requirements: 1. UNIX (HP, Sun, Digital, AIX) and Windows support. 2. Lightweight clients 3. Fast 4. Easily administrated We currently have 70 developers plus our internal web team using it with no issues. Admin is still only one person. Scalability - we have ~ 50,000 files in hundreds of branches, no issues. Bullet proof - AFAIK, we've only lost 3 days in the last 8 years due to the perforce server being down. We are a commercial company and paying for top quality CM tools is a no-brainer compared to the cost of not having them. If you are on a much smaller team with a tight budget then SVN might be the answer. I don't personally have any experience with it so I can't comment on capabilities.
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We switched over to perforce from a homegrown solution 8 years ago and have never looked back. It met our requirements: 1. UNIX (HP, Sun, Digital, AIX) and Windows support. 2. Lightweight clients 3. Fast 4. Easily administrated We currently have 70 developers plus our internal web team using it with no issues. Admin is still only one person. Scalability - we have ~ 50,000 files in hundreds of branches, no issues. Bullet proof - AFAIK, we've only lost 3 days in the last 8 years due to the perforce server being down. We are a commercial company and paying for top quality CM tools is a no-brainer compared to the cost of not having them. If you are on a much smaller team with a tight budget then SVN might be the answer. I don't personally have any experience with it so I can't comment on capabilities.
tj_nd89 wrote:
We are a commercial company and paying for top quality CM tools is a no-brainer compared to the cost of not having them. If you are on a much smaller team with a tight budget then SVN might be the answer.
Right now we are only 2 developers. From the reading I have done on perforce's website, it is free up to 4 users. cost wise at the moment both are the same. I got very solid and compelling argument for both tools. time permitting I want to test-drive both and see which one works best for us.;) Thanks all for your inputs.
/* I can C */ // or !C Yusuf
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May be this topic has been beaten to death several times.:~ If so, please pass the links to those discussions. We are looking to replace VSS with either one. Any pros and cons list comparison of both. I googled and found several comparisons. It appears most of the comparison are one sided.:rolleyes: Do you use one or both? what is your take on either one? Thanks for your thoughts.
/* I can C */ // and !C Yusuf
I know this is thread should be limited to Subversion, but can I throw in my $0.02 and recommend CVS? Our shop has been using it for 7 years and it works great! Again it's open source and free like subversion. http://www.march-hare.com/cvsnt/[^]
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May be this topic has been beaten to death several times.:~ If so, please pass the links to those discussions. We are looking to replace VSS with either one. Any pros and cons list comparison of both. I googled and found several comparisons. It appears most of the comparison are one sided.:rolleyes: Do you use one or both? what is your take on either one? Thanks for your thoughts.
/* I can C */ // and !C Yusuf
I would try out Git.. It's pretty nice and really fast.. minus the small learning curve. After a few days of reading docs.. you'll master it. Git was developed my Mr. Linus Torvald to be a replacement for CVS and SVN. There is actually a google video about Git which he presented. Documentation is kind of hard to find. I did manage to find a really good website by a computer science student/students that will help you with understand Git and how to use it. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ Good luck on your search. -BJ
Keep Coding
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I know this is thread should be limited to Subversion, but can I throw in my $0.02 and recommend CVS? Our shop has been using it for 7 years and it works great! Again it's open source and free like subversion. http://www.march-hare.com/cvsnt/[^]
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excuse my ignorance.:confused: Doesn't SVN picks where CVS left off. It is a faint recollection, I thought the reason of SVN development is to fill some of the shortcoming of CVS. Did I chew it wrong?:~
/* I can C */ // or !C Yusuf
No worries Yusuf. There are pros and cons to both CVS and Subervsion. In the end, it's personal preference. Here's a link to a quick comparison that may shed some light on your decision. http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php[^]
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Yeah, we did, happily. It was only when I discovered the ease of branching a current release while working on the next release and the automatic mirroring of my changes in our L.A. server that I saw any reason to change. Although I must admit that I've since found other things to like about it. :)
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
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Good to hear! FWIW, I've found the subversion metadata properties to be very useful, both the inbuilt (e.g. svn:ignore, svn:keywords) and our own that we've added. If you use an issue/bug tracker, read the TortoiseSVN help on how they've implemented it. The other advice (as an svn user since v0.29) I'd give is add a pre-commit hook to fail if no log message was entered. I've adopted the svn developers message format:
* path/to/file (modified member): details of change (another member): details of change * path/to/another/file (some member): details of changeBring on v1.5 and merge tracking! -
I have not used SV so I can't say it's better or worse than Perforce. If SV works well and is easy to maintain, I would use it, why? Because its free... You have to have an Apache serv for SV server right? I've used P4 in conjunction with about 20 users a couple years ago. Of course Perforce is free up to two users and x-amount (forgot the count) of workstations per user. No support for free. Perforce documentation was more than adequate. I am demo-ing it now on a project that a co-worker and I are working on. I just installed it on my workstation...really easy. The MVS plug-in works great, auto-check out, yada yada. Create a Job in P4 and as you work on it, you can attach a changelist (revision set) to the Job. So when you look at a particular Job, you can see all the changes that were made to complete the Job. SV may do this too??? You should at least check P4 out, great diff/merge tools. P4 has a little interaction with command line interface, but that shouldn't scare you (if you would be), just for setting up groups/users and such. My 2¢.
If you want to integrate svn with VS.NET. You may want to give http://www.pushok.com/soft\_svn.php a try. I have used the CVS flavor of this plugin and have been extremely satisfied with it. Saddly, there is a cost to it, about $25 per seat, but this is reasonnable.
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I have not used SV so I can't say it's better or worse than Perforce. If SV works well and is easy to maintain, I would use it, why? Because its free... You have to have an Apache serv for SV server right? I've used P4 in conjunction with about 20 users a couple years ago. Of course Perforce is free up to two users and x-amount (forgot the count) of workstations per user. No support for free. Perforce documentation was more than adequate. I am demo-ing it now on a project that a co-worker and I are working on. I just installed it on my workstation...really easy. The MVS plug-in works great, auto-check out, yada yada. Create a Job in P4 and as you work on it, you can attach a changelist (revision set) to the Job. So when you look at a particular Job, you can see all the changes that were made to complete the Job. SV may do this too??? You should at least check P4 out, great diff/merge tools. P4 has a little interaction with command line interface, but that shouldn't scare you (if you would be), just for setting up groups/users and such. My 2¢.
Quote: "You have to have an Apache serv for SV server right?" Svnserve.exe is the Standalone SVN SERVER Windows application/service. (No web server etc is required). SvnServe.exe is included in download from here: http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=8100&expandFolder=8100&folderID=8100 Download "svn-win32-x.x.x.zip" where x.x.x is latest revision There are many SVN CLIENT apps, TortoiseSvn is just one, http://tortoisesvn.net/ David
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May be this topic has been beaten to death several times.:~ If so, please pass the links to those discussions. We are looking to replace VSS with either one. Any pros and cons list comparison of both. I googled and found several comparisons. It appears most of the comparison are one sided.:rolleyes: Do you use one or both? what is your take on either one? Thanks for your thoughts.
/* I can C */ // and !C Yusuf
Yusuf and everyone else: Here are two pretty good references on the subject (i.e. revision control) that appear to be written by software engineers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison\_of\_revision\_control\_software http://better-scm.berlios.de Kind regards, David
David
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Yusuf and everyone else: Here are two pretty good references on the subject (i.e. revision control) that appear to be written by software engineers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison\_of\_revision\_control\_software http://better-scm.berlios.de Kind regards, David
David
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May be this topic has been beaten to death several times.:~ If so, please pass the links to those discussions. We are looking to replace VSS with either one. Any pros and cons list comparison of both. I googled and found several comparisons. It appears most of the comparison are one sided.:rolleyes: Do you use one or both? what is your take on either one? Thanks for your thoughts.
/* I can C */ // and !C Yusuf
What you should keep in mind when considering upgrade: Subversion is less tightly coupled with the Visual Studio than VSS. The MS Team System (which uses a Perforce-derived Source Control product) provides much better intergation of the development and testing cycle. In my experience, developers tend to forget some files not updated, tasks not closed, projects out of sync with the files used inside - SV cannot enforce such discipline. The Team System comes with built-in bug and change tracking capabilities, while for Subversion you must provide a separate product. It could be free, like Bugzilla, though. The big advantage of SV is that it is free; you can have the Tortoise installed on all computers, including graphical artists, technical writers, etc. The migration procedures from VSS are available, but you should remember that the underlying models are very different, therefore the whole picture of your product will look different in Subversion or in Perforce. Cheers, Alex
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I would try out Git.. It's pretty nice and really fast.. minus the small learning curve. After a few days of reading docs.. you'll master it. Git was developed my Mr. Linus Torvald to be a replacement for CVS and SVN. There is actually a google video about Git which he presented. Documentation is kind of hard to find. I did manage to find a really good website by a computer science student/students that will help you with understand Git and how to use it. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ Good luck on your search. -BJ
Keep Coding