On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 09:31:10 -0000, Michael Rigby-Jones wrote:

> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] 
> >On Behalf Of Ben Hencke
> >
> >Ick! I have to use SourceSafe all the time, and it is a nasty 
> >nasty version control system. The checkout/checkin model is 
> >insufficience even for a 2 person development team if you work 
> >on the same files. It is even worse if you have intermittent 
> >access to the server ie remote development/travel/dialup 
> >access. It locks all of the files that you do not checkout 
> >making it a huge pain to go back and forth to checkout/checkin 
> >for every file. If you don't checkout just the files you need, 
> >you end up blocking other people from checking out the files. 
> 
> I agree that for shared code development it has serious limitations.  We
> most always work on individual projects however, and have had no major
> problems in the last 6 years.  For this kind of work, it excels in it's
> simplicity.  The main reason it was chosen is that we already were using
> it for Visual Studio projects.

I have found that VSS has some really non-intuitive ways of doing things, including its naming of operations.  
I would expect "Check-out" to take the latest version of a file and extract it for editing, marking it on the 
system as being "mine".  "Check-in" as the reverse - taking the file back into the system, noting the changes, 
and releasing it for others to use (optionally deleting the file I'd been working on, with the default being 
settable for the whole site).  It's a while since I used it but I remember that the above isn't what it 
does...
 
> >I have lost several days of work due to it overwriting my 
> >changed files that I could not checkout because I was on the 
> >road -- without any warning or recourse.  There are some that 
> >might disagree, but I think that your version control system 
> >shouldn't require you to make backups of your code before using it.
> 
> I don't know how you managed to achieve this, it always given a warning
> when checking out if the files in the working directory have been
> modified.

*Several* people in the place I used it managed to lose their changes to programs - rather a failure for a 
system called "Source Safe"!  Something that, apperalently easily, wastes several days' work is not worth 
using, in my opinion.  That's not to say that PVCS (the other source-control package we tried) was any better, 
though.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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