At 01:57 PM 2/23/2004, you wrote:
>Stephen P Rufle said:
> > I also use VSS and I would like to know what about it is evil. I ask
> > because I was looking into CVS also and it seemed that for our office we
> >  would not gain much besides not having to pay for additional
> > SourceOffsite  (remote client for VSS) licenses.
> >
> > It may be that I am not using any of the bad features.
>
>It has been a while since I have used VSS so some of these things have
>possibly changed.  I have three major gripes
>
>1. It has a backwards culture.  By default it would always "exclusively"
>checkout files.  So if the programmer next to me would checkout a module
>(and thus hundreds of files), then run off to lunch.  Then I would need to
>make a one line change to one of those files, I would have to wait until
>he came back from lunch else do evil things to the repository.  It was
>very much a hassle and all our developers were in the same room.  CVS/SVN
>go on the "first commit wins" rule.  That is everyone can checkout as
>writeable and first one to commit wins other wise you reconcile the diff.
>This works out SO WELL!

This is actually what the guys i work with want. I had it setup to allow 
multiple checkouts. Then when the last person would checkin they would have 
to merge the changes. They complained so it is back to exclusive checkouts.


>2. It is too visually oriented.  All the tools were GUI based.  This is
>problematic because it makes things almost impossible to script or write
>wrapper applications around.  While VSS did have a few shell commands they
>were poorly documented and "clunky".

I guess that is what I learned on so it never effected me. I have used the 
command line version with some success but I can see that from the 
beginning that CVS has been oriented to the scriptable world which I like. 
And it has only been recently that I found a good external diff/merge tool. 
I like the VSS way of color coding .
    * new on left (blue)
    * new on right ( green )
    * same line but different text (red)
I think some of the issues have to do with the culture you know. I found 
that other developers have a hard time understanding the usefulness of 
branching and merging until they REALLY need it.

I have heard of subversion also and was waiting for it to be complete so I 
could take a look at it. Well thanks for the explanation.


>3. Corruption, Corruption and more corruption.  The repository was taking
>a dive pretty regularly.  We only had about 10 developers going against it
>and yet it had problems not corrupting on at least a bi-weekly basis.
>
>
>Some of number 3 had to do with it not having atomic commits.  For the
>record CVS does not have atomic commits either(svn does).  HOWEVER, it's
>clients are  not nearly as flaky so in several years with GNU Enterprise I
>think we have only had an issue once or twice with this.
>
>Its ability to track the history of the file line-by-line sucked as it was
>a third party extension that was of course visual.  cvs/svn annotate is my
>friend. :)
>
>Its diff tool sucked for the same reasons.  cvs/svn diff is my friend.
>
>Of course, this doesn't even address the largest issue to me.  That being,
>I chose not to use propreitary software that has Free Software
>equivalents. :)
>
>-Derek

Stephen P Rufle
stephen.p.rufle@cox.net
H:480-802-7173
Yahoo IM: stephen_rufle
AOL IM: stephen0rufle