Re: I'm searching for a my first version control system

toby wrote:
Rob Thorpe wrote:
ruherflo@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Good night

I 've never used a version control system.

- which software recommends to me for begining?

- can we recommends to me a tutorial or basic manual (in spanish, i
prefer) to learning the basic concepts of the version control system?

I'll go against the general trend here an recommend CVS.

Bad idea. I've used both. Subversion is what it claims to be: A
compelling replacement. CVS feels very clunky after experience with
Svn, and has some very definite disadvantages, which are outlined on
the Subversion home page.

See http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/
And TortoiseCVS:
http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
Tortoise CVS is a very good interface into CVS.

Subversion is a newer system I haven't used it yet. But it works by
storing the versioning information in a database. I don't like this
approach very much, because recovering corrupted databases can be very
difficult.

Your comment does not bear the weight of first-hand experience. That's
no longer the case. Subversion's FSFS repository format does not suffer
from this drawback. I've used it heavily in production with
multi-gigabyte repositories with no issues whatsoever. In fact, I never
saw repository corruption with BDB either, but I stopped using the BDB
repositories a while ago due to occasional locking problems.

I'm currently sitting next to a bunch of programmers who all use
Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe. They've been using it for years and tell
me they have never had any problems with it. That doesn't mean though
that it is not possible to have problems. In fact it's well known that
a VSS library database will become corrupt if a machine goes down while
writing into it - though it is possible now to solve the problem.

There are also other aspects of Subversion I'm rather suspicious of:
* It's absolutely huge. CVS is about 90Klines of code which is very
long. Subversion though, once it's various components are examined is
well into the 100s of thousands. Compare that to Torvald's Git/Cogito
system for example, which is a bit simpler, but much, much shorter.
* It has two back ends. My problem is: which is the most reliable? A
lot of people seem to be using FSFS rather than BDB, but FSFS is much
newer code. Also, which do I use, the direct server or through Apache.
The fact there are these choices splits the experience being built up
by users in two, so relatively few people are testing each possible
combination. Making it more likely serious bugs are still present in
some combinations.

I'm not saying CVS is good, as someone once said "CVS is an horrific
train-wreck of an application but compared to VSS it's a triumph of
software engineering." But at least I know how to intervene and adjust
a CVS repository, and I have that freedom.

I can well believe that Subversion does not have any problems in this
regard. But I'm not willing to bet on it at this stage.

.

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