*Details* about what's wrong with SourceSafe please?

[sherifffruitfly]

Hi all,

I'm working to convince management to get us off of sourcesafe, and on
to TFS. Thus far, we've been using VSS in only a "baby" kind of way
(one person at a time working on a file, no branches, etc.). We have
therefore not encountered any of the easily-googled problems with VSS.

Without a detailed explanation of what VSS does wrong in more advanced
situations, they're likely not to believe me. "Branching doesn't work"
isn't going to fly, for example.

Can anybody give me the details of precisely what VSS does that makes,
e.g., branching not work? And similarly for the other glamourous VSS
problems?

Once again: I already know that we shouldn't be using VSS. I'm looking
for *details*. The bulk of what I found via google was of the
"branching doesn't work!" variety.

I looked for a source control group, and didn't find one. Apologies if
I missed it.


Thanks,

cdj

 

[Michael B. Trausch]

I'm working to convince management to get us off of sourcesafe, and on
to TFS. Thus far, we've been using VSS in only a "baby" kind of way
(one person at a time working on a file, no branches, etc.). We have
therefore not encountered any of the easily-googled problems with VSS.

Without a detailed explanation of what VSS does wrong in more advanced
situations, they're likely not to believe me. "Branching doesn't work"
isn't going to fly, for example.

You could check out the Wikipedia articles[1,2] for a decent starting
point. Also, you may want to consider other alternatives. Functional
VCSes which are suitable for multiple developers fall into two
categories: centralized and distributed. Some distributed systems also
enable a centralized workflow (Bazaar[3] is one of these).

For systems that carry with them low cost, I would recommend Bazaar in
first place, and Subversion[4] in second place. The git system[5]
is suited mostly for UNIX and UNIX-like systems, so it's not really an
option if you're doing Windows-based development. Bazaar (being
written in Python) is cross-platform, and has a decent GUI for Linux
and Windows systems; the same can be said for Subversion. The major
difference between the two is that Bazaar enables a lot more to be done
locally, and can save a great deal of network bandwidth due to the way
it does things. One of the biggest advantages of it (or any
distributed revision control system, really) is that you can work
offline, or in the face of network failure, for example. Also, merging
and branching is a *great* deal easier with Bazaar when compared to
Subversion. I can't speak to VSS or TFS for any of those qualities,
though.

--- Mike

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_SourceSafe
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar_(software)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(software)
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

 

[sherifffruitfly]

I've never had a single problem with VSS 2005.


And why might that be...?


microsoft.public.sourcesafe, maybe...?

Thanks for the input.

I meant a *general* source control group. I didn't think my chances of
a helpful response were very high in a group of VSS people.

 

[sherifffruitfly]

I'm working to convince management to get us off of sourcesafe, and on
to TFS. Thus far, we've been using VSS in only a "baby" kind of way
(one person at a time working on a file, no branches, etc.). We have
therefore not encountered any of the easily-googled problems with VSS.

Without a detailed explanation of what VSS does wrong in more advanced
situations, they're likely not to believe me. "Branching doesn't work"
isn't going to fly, for example.

You could check out the Wikipedia articles[1,2] for a decent starting
point.  Also, you may want to consider other alternatives.  Functional
VCSes which are suitable for multiple developers fall into two
categories: centralized and distributed.  Some distributed systems also
enable a centralized workflow (Bazaar[3] is one of these).

For systems that carry with them low cost, I would recommend Bazaar in
first place, and Subversion[4] in second place.  The git system[5]
is suited mostly for UNIX and UNIX-like systems, so it's not really an
option if you're doing Windows-based development.  Bazaar (being
written in Python) is cross-platform, and has a decent GUI for Linux
and Windows systems; the same can be said for Subversion.  The major
difference between the two is that Bazaar enables a lot more to be done
locally, and can save a great deal of network bandwidth due to the way
it does things.  One of the biggest advantages of it (or any
distributed revision control system, really) is that you can work
offline, or in the face of network failure, for example.  Also, merging
and branching is a *great* deal easier with Bazaar when compared to
Subversion.  I can't speak to VSS or TFS for any of those qualities,
though.

        --- Mike

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_SourceSafe
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar_(software)
[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(software)
[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

Thanks - if I had my druthers, we'd be using subversion. But I don't,
and TFS or VSS are the only options willing to be considered here.

Thanks for the wiki links - I totally spaced on thinking of looking
there.

 

[Jeff Johnson]

Thanks for the input.

I meant a *general* source control group. I didn't think my chances of
a helpful response were very high in a group of VSS people.

While there may be fanboys, a lot of people are quite willing to tell you
what they think is both right and wrong about a product. For example, I
frequent the Classic VB groups and I have no qualms about pointing out VB's
flaws. There may be folks in the SourceSafe group who are willing to do the
same.

By the way, I haven't been burned by VSS in the years I've used it. Yes,
there is an occasional database corruption issue, but it's usually only one
file and a gazillion versions back.

Then again, I've never tried any other form of source control, so I very
well may not know what I'm missing....

 

[Brian Gideon]

Hi all,

I'm working to convince management to get us off of sourcesafe, and on
to TFS. Thus far, we've been using VSS in only a "baby" kind of way
(one person at a time working on a file, no branches, etc.). We have
therefore not encountered any of the easily-googled problems with VSS.

Without a detailed explanation of what VSS does wrong in more advanced
situations, they're likely not to believe me. "Branching doesn't work"
isn't going to fly, for example.

Can anybody give me the details of precisely what VSS does that makes,
e.g., branching not work? And similarly for the other glamourous VSS
problems?

Once again: I already know that we shouldn't be using VSS. I'm looking
for *details*. The bulk of what I found via google was of the
"branching doesn't work!" variety.

I looked for a source control group, and didn't find one. Apologies if
I missed it.

Thanks,

cdj

Just a few off the top of my head.

1) Commits (or checkins) are not atomic.

2) There is no mechanism for identifying a particular revision of a
project (aside from manually creating a label) because each file has
it's own revision number.

3) The performance is terrible compared to other products.

4) Branches are expensive compared to other products.

5) The database has a tendency to get corrupted. This has happened to
me on several occasions.

6) There is no merge tracking nevermind the broader general lack of
other branching capabilities.

7) There is no way to see *only* your changes since diffs are computed
against the database copy only.

8) There is no way of committing (or checking in) several files
simultaneously as a single unit of work. IMO, this by itself is
enough reason not to use VSS.

 

[Adam Benson]

Have you set up and tried TFS? If you're an MSDN subscriber you ought to be
able to set up a test system on virtual PC to try it out. Have you tried
branching yourself on VSS?

Set up a test involving a couple of files which get branched, make some
non-conflicting changes and some conflicting changes on the files and then
try to merge them together. See what happens.

Choosing a source code control tool is not to be done lightly and I for one
would not recommend TFS. I tried it and found the setup alone to be quite
burdensome compared to other options. I also did not think much of its
branching and merging capabilities.

Your bosses should believe you if you can put a demonstration in front of
them of what happens when you branch a file on to one or more dev streams
and then merge.

Personally I recommend that you look at :
http://www.perforce.com/index.html
http://www.accurev.com/

Your source code is your business and if your bosses don't understand that
they probably won't be succesful.

That's my 2p worth.

HTH,

Adam.
=========

 

[Hans Kesting]

It happens that sherifffruitfly formulated :

Hi all,

I'm working to convince management to get us off of sourcesafe, and on
to TFS. Thus far, we've been using VSS in only a "baby" kind of way
(one person at a time working on a file, no branches, etc.). We have
therefore not encountered any of the easily-googled problems with VSS.

Without a detailed explanation of what VSS does wrong in more advanced
situations, they're likely not to believe me. "Branching doesn't work"
isn't going to fly, for example.

Can anybody give me the details of precisely what VSS does that makes,
e.g., branching not work? And similarly for the other glamourous VSS
problems?

Once again: I already know that we shouldn't be using VSS. I'm looking
for *details*. The bulk of what I found via google was of the
"branching doesn't work!" variety.

I looked for a source control group, and didn't find one. Apologies if
I missed it.


Thanks,

cdj

We used to use VSS, until the database got corrupted. The filesystem
was full, so VSS apparently deleted one of it's database-directories.
As files appear to be randomly distributed over those, a lot of
projects were affected.

Luckily we were already in the process of migrating to TFS, so we just
had to speed that up a bit.

TFS is much faster than VSS and also has some "management-level
features" for reporting on the progress of a project.

Hans Kesting