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Re: Looking for a simple win32 GUI

From: Scott Lamb <slamb_at_slamb.org>
Date: 2002-06-06 07:06:48 CEST

Karl Fogel wrote:
> I'm intrigued by this request (unable to satisfy it, btw, just want to
> know more about it). Why does your boss want to see a simple svn GUI?
> Or can you not say? :-)

Let me describe my situation, which is maybe similar and probably not
atypical. (Sorry for the longwindedness.)

I work with about a half dozen people. We do a lot of small projects.
Most people (including myself) are students and so only a couple/few
years. A typical project will be in maintenance for a while after its
sole developer leaves.

Yet...we have no SCM. Until recently, there was only a directory on a
network share that all apps supposedly go into. For a few reasons, I think:

- Unfamiliarity. The permanent employees are not primarily programmers.
The students are, naturally, inexperienced. The concept of SCM at all is
unfamiliar.
- CVS doesn't handle binary files well. Some problems may have been
mentioned but not relevant to us (we don't care about merging branches)
and some genuine (no binary deltas mean my current project will soon eat
up 100MB for a file growing toward 500KB. ergh).
- Time to set up / learn / use the system.

I think this is exactly the sort of environment that generates a request
like that. The larger project features (hierarchical repositories, even
branches, even concurrency at all) just aren't at all important, so an
interface like TortoiseCVS is ideal - only the basics, shows up in the
Explorer window that would be open anyway. I also have ViewCVS on a
webserver, very easy to use as well. Converting from CVS to Subversion
would be really nice, primarily for the better handling of binary files.
But it won't happen until both those exist for Subversion.

(Just to finish the story: our current status is that I use CVS for
everything I do; a knowledgeable coworker does a lot of stuff in CVS as
well. No one else does, though I'm making some progress. My boss said
the other day "CVS would solve this problem, wouldn't it?" when he was
wondering where a recent ex-student employee stashed a newer version of
a project.)

--
Scott Lamb
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Received on Thu Jun 6 07:08:30 2002

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