Subversion vs VSS

Hello all,

I'm in the process of evaluating a variety of source code versioning systems to potentially replace Microsoft VSS in our development environment. I'm pretty motivated to move off VSS because I'm nervous about data corruption in our large and growing repository. Since we don't use a full-blown MS IDE (we develop embedded software), VSS isn't a perfect fit in any event. However it does provide a couple of nice features that I can't find in Subversion so I figured I'd ask the group.

VSS allows me to share files amongst projects. This is useful to us as we have a number of smallish projects that share some common code. So if three products all need timer.c and I fix a bug in timer.c, all three projects benefit upon the next build. In Subversion the nearest thing to this I can find is externals, but that would imply a blob of common files without the granularity that we have today. Am I missing anything here?

Another smaller feature is the ability to refresh a directory of code with the latest from VSS. I simply say "get latest version" from VSS and I get updates to any stale files. I don't have to clear the directory out and grab everything. This isn't a huge deal, but we do this on a pretty regular basis so I think I'd get pushback if this went away.

Finally I'm a little underwhelmed by the Tortoise UI that I've been playing with. It's simple and it works, but I think I'd like something a little more powerful. Any suggestions for a Subversion GUI client for Windows?

Thanks.

- Jeff Allison
  FEI-Zyfer, Inc.
Received on Thu Apr 28 00:24:07 2005