CVS / SourceSafe

[HarryW]

How many people use CVS or SourceSafe for their home/work development?

How many people have used either/both?

Which do you prefer?

Am I barking up the wrong tree and they're totally different?

[filburt1]

SourceSafe is awesome for synchronizing the efforts of a software development team, or ANY kind of development team, for that matter.

[HarryW]

Okay, what about CVS? Have you tried that?

Sorry, I forgot to mention: please say which it is you use, CVS or SourceSafe, if you use either of them. And if you don't use either for a good reason please say why

I'm guessing most people here won't use CVS because SourceSafe is a M$ product, thus it gets bloody everywhere

[filburt1]

Haven't heard of it.

[InvisibleDuncan]

We use SourceSafe basically because it comes as part of Visual Studio and we're a multi-developer environment. It has a few quirks, but basically it's very good.

[HarryW]

Have you used/heard of CVS?

[InvisibleDuncan]

Nope - it's a new one on me. Because we don't have any problems with SS, though, we'd be unlikely even to glance at CVS unless it has something particularly special to offer.

[HarryW]

CVS is, like, the original (I think) groupware product like SourceSafe is. Started out as a bunch of Unix shell scripts in 1986, and is now a widely used (so I'm told) platform-independant kinda thing. It's also open-source, or something. Well it's free at least.

I haven't used SourceSafe and I don't even know much about CVS, although I am starting to use it now and it seems pretty useful. That's why I'm asking - I'd like to know how it compares to SourceSafe.

'CVS' stands for 'Concurrent Versioning System' or something I think.

I'm not trying to evangelise here, in case that's what you think, you don't have to look at it if you don't care

[denniswrenn]

I've heard of it before, but never used it. http://www.cvshome.org/

[Geoff Gunson]

We use both because at work we develop code for about 5 different platforms, SourceSafe is easy to use, CVS very powerful but only in the hands of a unix master (not me). Although you can get WinCvs which will is a similar GUI to VSS that interfaces to the CVS database.

G

[HarryW]

That's what I use, WinCVS, with the CVS repository on a linux server.

I'm still getting the hang of this whole group development version control stuff (or whatever you'd call it) but from what I've seen it's one of those things that I just didn't know I needed, but it's actually really really handy

Still don't know enough about it to use the command-line interface though.

[Geoff Gunson]

Thats what I meant about the unix master, there is so much stuff you can do, like the merging of files but which function is newer stuff like that.

G