Alex Rivera | Logout

SVN? VSS? Why is one better than the other?

Asked 2008-11-20T18:27:45.373
17

I tend to get the feeling that most folks here think SVN is gold-plated goodness, whereas VSS is the worst program ever devised (at least as Version Control is concerned).

That said, why? I've used some CVS, and my current job uses VSS, and from a grunt on the team's perspective, I can't really tell that much difference. Most of the differences I've seen are cosmetic. Granted, I've not tried to do any branching/merging in either, but as a coder who comes in, checks out files, works on those files and checks them in at the end of the day, why would I want 1 over the other?

svn version-control visual-sourcesafe
Edit
Report

2 Answers

3

SVN has some important features over CVS/VSS, like atomic commits, cheap copies, more efficient storage on the server side.

SVN is, however, not the only revison control system out there... There are a lot of different revision control applications. A new trend seems to be towards distributed revision control, like Git or Mercurial.

answered 2008-11-20T18:31:31.840
0

I actually think Perforce is the gold-plated goodness. The GUI tools are good enough that you can give them to a designer or artist and get them to use source control like us devs. I'm pretty sure the VSS File->Add Files window predates windows 95. The whole concept of files in use being locked is absurd. Didn't we solve that decades ago with CONCURRENT versioning? I have experienced history corruption and (correct me if I'm wrong) but VSS does not even support branches and merges.

answered 2008-11-20T18:46:00.280

Your Answer