Personally, I like TortoiseSVN:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org
There's also RapidSVN:
http://rapidsvn.tigris.org
I also work at a small startup and I'm attempting to champion Subversion (so
far successfully).
My boss - essentially the VP of engineering, likes open source tools (we use
PHP and MySQL etc.).
We also don't have much money to spend.
When I first started looking for a source control tool, I tried to set up
CVS. I had problems with the configuration. When I went looking for
solutions (or alternatives), I found Subversion. The repository
features and the server setup are clearly superior to CVS. The front-ends
are quite functional but still unsophisticated.
If you try to use TortoiseSVN, it's important to at least configure an
external diff tool.
For people used to CVS and Visual Source Safe, it's a change to check out an
entire project at a time
rather than just the file/files you are working on. It's also a change not
to be able to see who has
what checked out. In our company, people are used to sharing one development
server, rather than
doing all development on their PC - still they are making the effort to try
to use source control
at all and Subversion at least for now.
Perhaps the question to ask your boss is what exactly does he believe he is
getting from Perforce
for all the extra money he'd have to spend?
Chuck
> -----Original Message-----
> From: guido@12-236-84-31.client.attbi.com
> [mailto:guido@12-236-84-31.client.attbi.com] On Behalf Of
> Guido van Rossum
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 7:39 PM
> To: users@subversion.tigris.org
> Subject: Subversion vs. Perforce
>
>
> In our young startup I've installed Subversion because I
> could, and we've been using it for about a month now
> successfully (admittedly I've done 95% of all checkins, we've
> not started using Apache, and I've failed miserably at
> building from source for Red Hat 9 -- a mystery which I don't
> have time to research further alas). We now have a real VP
> of engineering, and he wants to switch to Perforce. This is
> not a fight I want to spend a lot of time on, but if there's
> an obvious rebuttal to his arguments for switching I'd like
> to hear it.
>
> His reasoning is that we're going to have *one* company-wide
> source control system for all documents that need to be under
> source control, not just code, but also specs, docs,
> marketing collateral, etc. I agree with this. Then he
> argues that non-engineers such as marketing are going to use
> the source control software, and that they won't be able to
> use Subversion since there's only a command line interface,
> while Perforce has a nice GUI for such people. I agree that
> a GUI is necessary.
>
> So now my question: what does Subversion has that compares to
> Perforce's GUI? I've used Perforce in the past, but only the
> command line interface so I don't know what its GUI does, but
> I imagine it's a nice piece of work, especially if you're on
> Windows (the only platform we care about for non-engineers).
> I liked the Perforce command line interface fine, but I'd
> prefer to continue to work with Subversion if only to support
> open source, and to save the $750/seat that Perforce will
> cost, and perhaps because I like Subversion's model for
> per-repository revisions and its approach to branching
> better. But for that money I can't put up much of a fight --
> I want to save energy for real work and for defending
> Python's role in the project if it becomes under threat.
>
> Should I give up, or is there a good GUI for Subversion?
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
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Received on Wed Sep 10 02:07:38 2003