Stephen P Rufle said:
> I also use VSS and I would like to know what about it is evil. I ask
> because I was looking into CVS also and it seemed that for our office we
>  would not gain much besides not having to pay for additional
> SourceOffsite  (remote client for VSS) licenses.
>
> It may be that I am not using any of the bad features.

It has been a while since I have used VSS so some of these things have
possibly changed.  I have three major gripes

1. It has a backwards culture.  By default it would always "exclusively"
checkout files.  So if the programmer next to me would checkout a module
(and thus hundreds of files), then run off to lunch.  Then I would need to
make a one line change to one of those files, I would have to wait until
he came back from lunch else do evil things to the repository.  It was
very much a hassle and all our developers were in the same room.  CVS/SVN
go on the "first commit wins" rule.  That is everyone can checkout as
writeable and first one to commit wins other wise you reconcile the diff. 
This works out SO WELL!

2. It is too visually oriented.  All the tools were GUI based.  This is
problematic because it makes things almost impossible to script or write
wrapper applications around.  While VSS did have a few shell commands they
were poorly documented and "clunky".

3. Corruption, Corruption and more corruption.  The repository was taking
a dive pretty regularly.  We only had about 10 developers going against it
and yet it had problems not corrupting on at least a bi-weekly basis.


Some of number 3 had to do with it not having atomic commits.  For the
record CVS does not have atomic commits either(svn does).  HOWEVER, it's
clients are  not nearly as flaky so in several years with GNU Enterprise I
think we have only had an issue once or twice with this.

Its ability to track the history of the file line-by-line sucked as it was
a third party extension that was of course visual.  cvs/svn annotate is my
friend. :)

Its diff tool sucked for the same reasons.  cvs/svn diff is my friend.

Of course, this doesn't even address the largest issue to me.  That being,
I chose not to use propreitary software that has Free Software
equivalents. :)

-Derek


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