Quote Originally Posted by simonm View Post
So Subversion is good then is it? In what ways is it better than SourceSafe?
We've been using SourceSafe for 7 years. I had a lot of reasons to switch to Subversion.

* Subversion is a true source control system, whereas SSafe is mostly a client-server implementation. I had to go out and repair SSafe several times, and I never figured out the reason why the SSafe files were corrupt (our DB was about 1 GB at that time). I never had any problems with Subversion, which treats user actions like commits as a transaction.
* I could never trully enforce security with SSafe, simply it was based on the SSafe API.
* Backup is a breeze with Subversion.
* Source control database is smaller with Subversion.
* We can now access the repository over the internet, without resorting to third-party solutions or a VPN.
* Even when using https for the coms protocol, Subversion is faster on most operations.
* Subversion integrates with our bugtracker. And I can also integrate it with whatever else comes to mind by using hooks.
* Tagging/branching is real easy and natural.
* The command line interface to Subversion actually works very well, so I can have Subversion-based build actions for our production builds. SSafe was very moody on this particular item, especially if you had labels in the database.
* It's easy to add almost anything in Subversion - Tortoise is a great piece of work.
* It's trivial to resolve conflicts and I can have more than one devs work on a single solution. SSafe supposedly added the capability to have multiple checkouts but it was clunky as hell.
* Last, but not least, Subversion is being used by a lot of people. It keeps improving constantly and you can find lots of forum-based support.

We've been running on Subversion for 9 months now and I've become a big fan. My only real problem was migrating from SSafe to Subversion but I wrote a toolie to do it and that was that.