Corporate source control software

[brikis98]

My company currently uses Rational ClearCase and I just cannot stand the software. I don't know if it's the Windows Client I use, a bad server setup, too much load, whatever, but I have had nothing but trouble with it. Views are constantly corrupted, checking in/out a 3K file takes 30-60 seconds, the "find checkouts" feature is broken and so on.

I want to make an argument to switch over to different source control software and was wondering what you guys have experience with. Note that this would be for a very LARGE code base used by THOUSANDS of employees...

 

[Nothinman]

I haven't used ClearCase but I've seen a lot of people complain about it, personally I don't know why anyone would pay for version control software when so many free alternatives are available. Since you have so many employees the biggest problem will be getting them to us the new software.

Something like Subversion would probably be the past of least resistance since it's pretty simple and there's Windows clients for it.

git is really taking off in the OSS world because of how fast and efficient it is but it requires cygwin to work on Windows and you'd probably have to change your whole workflow.

 

[nweaver]

the biggest problem with Subversion is office docs. It reads .doc and .xls as binary files, so you don't get diffs. Office 2k3 and above all support saving as XML, and that can get around that issue.

 

[mundane]

Originally posted by: nweaver
the biggest problem with Subversion is office docs. It reads .doc and .xls as binary files, so you don't get diffs. Office 2k3 and above all support saving as XML, and that can get around that issue.

Source is generally plaintext, so if it's just code the OP shouldn't hit any problems. Any version control would require special handlers for specific binary file types (say, if some of your design docs are Visio or Word).

We switched over to SVN, and have just accepted the fact that it can't diff the binary files. We try to encourage very descriptive log messages, instead =)

 

[Nothinman]

the biggest problem with Subversion is office docs. It reads .doc and .xls as binary files, so you don't get diffs. Office 2k3 and above all support saving as XML, and that can get around that issue.

That'll be true of any binary format that the repo doesn't have a filter for, it would probably just make more sense to use another format. And I believe the the XML files that Office spits out are zipped by default so they'll still be binary files.

 

[titan7]

Perforce is great.

 

[elmro]

Our development team switched from Clearcase to Accurev. I love Accurev.

 

[Argo]

There are many out there, that work for different scenarios

1) CVS - Easy to easy and setup, limited functionality.
2) Perforce - fairly inexpensive. Easy to maintain, pretty good functionality. The only knock on it is weak conflct resolution functionality
3) Clearcase - very powerful from the end user experience. Has pretty much every feature you can think of. However, it's very expensive, and nightmare to maintain.

 

[you2]

We use perforce. Folks like it - i have no complaints - but I'm sure it is expensive. I've used CVS. Didn't have any complaints with it (and it is free). The 'experts' sez that perforce has some ++ over cvs - but i mostly turned them out so i can't recount the major +,

 

[you2]

Btw I have used rational product before (back in 2000 we used rational rose). I thought it was a piece of junk

 

[Markbnj]

I'd probably recommend Visual Studio Team System for a Microsoft-centric environment. It's very powerful, with source control being just one facet of it.

Subversion has a pretty good rep on the open source side, but from what I have been told it uses the same repository engine as CVS, and that has quite a few known problems. CVSNT is suppoed to be better, and is also free on the server side (and for client-side command line tools). If you want Visual Studio integration via SCCI that costs $150-ish per seat from March Hare.

 

[brikis98]

thanks for the reply folks... i talked to the folks in charge of it for my division and the general consensus is that ClearCase is a piece of crap and everyone hates it.

unfortunately, being part of a large corporation has it's drawbacks... we're not switching away from this POS software any time soon, largely because moving over that much code and that many developers is prohibitively expensive and difficult at this point. And, for whatever reason, clearcase has apparently become the de facto standard in the industry for large corporations that have many branches, in many locations, running different environments, etc.

sigh...

/goes off to kill another 3 hours trying to check in 4 files, each less than 5kb...

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

the biggest problem with Subversion is office docs. It reads .doc and .xls as binary files, so you don't get diffs. Office 2k3 and above all support saving as XML, and that can get around that issue.

That'll be true of any binary format that the repo doesn't have a filter for, it would probably just make more sense to use another format. And I believe the the XML files that Office spits out are zipped by default so they'll still be binary files.

nope, and the XML works great in Subversion. We are deciding between using that or MS Sharepoint for a version control/document repository. I'm leaning to Subversion, but that's because I like simple and clean, not clunky with extras you will never need + lots -o- licensing fees/restrictions.