RE: Subversion and CM Synergy

Hi,

> Our workplace hasn't settled on a VCS (some of the projects have been
> using CVS, and the decision is being made if to move to a different
> system). One of the options is CM Synergy (because we
> already license
> it and with the CM component thrown in, it is effectively "free").
> Your mail is the first reference I've seen to it, and you sound like
> you aren't happy with it (you said in a later mail:

Yes you are correct. I'm not happy with CM Synergy but me and other developers are minority. For some odd reason which I can't understand integrators and managers just love this tool.
I have a developer's point of view to this matter which you should keep in mind. I have used the following VCS:s myself: Subversion, CVS, CM Synergy, Rational ClearCase and Microsoft SourceSafe. Of these tools CM Synergy and SourceSafe are absolutely the worst IMHO.

> Can you give any other reasons so I have some more
> ammunition? Perhaps
> including support, how active the development and maintenance is,
> features vs Subversion and ease of use? Plus anything else
> that would
> be useful to know.

There is a version control systems comparison in the web, check it out: http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison/comparison.html
Now what is the worst with CM Synergy compared to Subversion is you have to learn very different way of thinking version control. And because of this the learning curve is enormous. With subversion or CVS your new team member is ready to use it with half hour briefing but with CM Synergy you really need to go through dozen of different courses. This is also because of CM Synergy's awful GUI which looks like some engineer's work where he/she just added more buttons and tick boxes more and more without revising the GUI :)

CM Synergy is task based. This leads to bureaucracy. If you´re not using agile development it's just fine. But if you are then it's pain in the ass. Why? Because you want to do code integration in small pieces and very ofter which is not possible with CM Synergy. Or actually it is but you need to make a new task each time -> bureaucratic. Also if you have two or more developers doing work together you can't share your code with CM Synergy. Using subversion it's easy for the very same reason -> integration is made all the time.

These are all just my own opinions. Some other with more experience with CM Synergy may totally disagree with me :)

BR, Pasi

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Received on Thu Mar 10 16:46:33 2005