>-----Original Message-----
>From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] 
>Sent: 13 December 2004 12:52
>To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
>Subject: RE: [PIC] Version Control System?
>
>
>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...
> 

That is *exactly* what they do.  The file is marked as "checked out"
under your username, and if someone else wants to work on it as well,
you have to split the development path.  This is were is gets very messy
and Source Safe isn't very good for multiple developers per file.


>> >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.

There is a way this can happen, if you remove the read only attribute on
a file in the working directory, edit it, save it and then re-set the
read-only attribute, VSS will overwrite it if you check out the file.
That would be purely down to the user abusing the system however.

Regards

Mike

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