How to implement CVS system?

[edmicman]

We have a serious source code control problem here at work, and I'm looking for solutions. We have a ton of classic ASP and new development is .NET - mostly ASP.NET but we do the occasional console/windows app, too. Right now source code is strung anywhere, sometimes on developers machines, sometimes on developers webs, sometimes in the testing folder, etc. We need something.

Managment talked about doing SourceSafe 2005, but they won't shell out for enough licenses, so they were proposing having just a few people act as gatekeepers to check things in and out for developers. I think this would suck, and be a pain. Plus this seems to have fallen by the wayside as well. I was thinking that maybe we could implement a free/open source solution.

I've played with TortoiseCVS at home. Well, I installed it, pulled some code from sourceforge for a project, and played around with adding my own local project to a local folder. But I'm not really sure if it's actually doing what I think it's doing or not when working on my own stuff. I never set up any sort of server or anything, I just created a module (I think that's what it was called?) for my code folder.

Are there any good resources for setting up CVS for use in a windows environment? Do you really need to set up a server (meaning, involving more people who are alreay busy) or can you just install the clients, add the source folders, and it keeps track of things via the CVS folder in each project? Or isn't that how it works?

I hear that SVN sounds like it's better than CVS, but it sounds like it has incompatibilities with .NET 2003, and we have to maintain a bunch of 2003 web projects, so I don't think that would work.

Any pointers in the right direction or help would be great. Thanks!

 

[Armitage]

I would definitley take a closer look at SVN - it has alot nice stuff that CVS doesn't. Though I've never used it on Windows, and certainly not with .net

What you do need with either system is a repository. It is a server after a fashion, but it's not very hard to set up, at least on *nix. You want the repository on a reliable machine that gets backed up religiously. IIRC the docs for either system walk you through setting it up it pretty well.

 

[programmer]

Visual Studio 2005 ("Team System") has a highly integrated source code control system that looks pretty decent for most projects. You should check with your license dude to see what kinds of licenses you currently have. You may already have SourceSafe included, depending on what level MSDN you have (assuming you have MSDN as that is the only sane thing if you are buying multiple licenses anyway).

At my company we use CVS, and the CM dev team is working on adding Subversion (the next gen CVS). Yes, I said CM dev team. We have about a dozen engineers dedicated to just CM development projects. Granted, they develop and support hundreds (probably thousands) of projects on many different platforms, from Tandem to Windows Vista, for hundreds of engineers.

Honestly, if your mgmt thinks they can go on-the-cheap by using CVS, they need to be prepared to have a FT staff to administer it (servers, backups, support, operations, restorations). It will likely end up being more expensive than using sourcesafe, but more flexible in the long run.

If you are serious about CVS, the place to start is www.cvsnt.org. Not sure about the best source for Subversion. Both systems have books dedicated to them.

 

[edmicman]

Thanks for the info. I think the deal with SVN was it created some hidden folder or something that caused .NET 2003 web applications to not work. I think it was supposed to not be an issue in 2005, but we still use 2003 for a lot of things, and there was a workaround, but it seemed like that was a hassle, too.

I'll check the docs, see whats up. I can't seem to get to the TortoiseCVS page from work for some reason...guess I'll read it tonight!

 

[fs5]

Originally posted by: edmicman
Thanks for the info. I think the deal with SVN was it created some hidden folder or something that caused .NET 2003 web applications to not work. I think it was supposed to not be an issue in 2005, but we still use 2003 for a lot of things, and there was a workaround, but it seemed like that was a hassle, too.

I'll check the docs, see whats up. I can't seem to get to the TortoiseCVS page from work for some reason...guess I'll read it tonight!

you need a CVS server first of all. Tortoise is the CVS client. (when you were working with sourceforge, sf was the cvs server).

SVN was created by the CVS team to shore up deficencies with CVS. CVS and SVN have the same methods of tracking files. I know CVS creates a 'CVS' folder in every folder that you are running version control on. I believe SVN does it the same way.

As far as I know CVS is safe to use with .NET applications.

As for a server, the one I've used on Windows is http://www.march-hare.com/cvspro/ . Of course you're better off setting up a linux server and CVS on it.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: programmer
Honestly, if your mgmt thinks they can go on-the-cheap by using CVS, they need to be prepared to have a FT staff to administer it (servers, backups, support, operations, restorations).

Full time staff to administer cvs? Yeah, it may take a while to get a server set up and clients working nicely if nobody there knows how to do it yet, but after you get up and running it should hardly need any maintenance. If you find a server that'll run on windows you can probably use existing backup methods. Just make sure you teach the developers how to do routine things they might need like branches and such.

It's really not that hard, lots of people do it at home all the time (I run an svn server for all my school work).

 

[fs5]

Originally posted by: kamperFull time staff to administer cvs? Yeah, it may take a while to get a server set up and clients working nicely if nobody there knows how to do it yet, but after you get up and running it should hardly need any maintenance. If you find a server that'll run on windows you can probably use existing backup methods. Just make sure you teach the developers how to do routine things they might need like branches and such.

It's really not that hard, lots of people do it at home all the time (I run an svn server for all my school work).

It's also hard to believe that nobody on your development team has any experience with version control. Someone should have some semblence of an idea about which version control system to use.

 

[pcthuglife]

This website posted a pretty good article on this topic a while ago:
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2310

 

[edmicman]

Thanks for the AT article link - that looks really good!

As far as why there's nothing already - with the old ASP files, they used the system of a changelog at the top of every file, and copying changed files to an "old" directory with a timestamp and doing it that way. .NET doesn't really lend itself to that, so there's not much to work with. I don't think we have an MSDN license, and they're really tight about spending money, espeically if its $500+ per developer for sourcesafe.

The SVN issue I was thinking about is covered here and here, but it sounds like maybe they've worked around it. Last time I checked it was a "bug" because of VS.NET 2003, and they said that VS was wrong, and so there wasn't any official support of the fix.

Guess I'll do some more reading tonight and try and throw something together in the way of an email. Maybe if I can get some of the other guys on board, we can try it out on a test server or something. Thanks!