Recently I was asked to research the features of Subversion as a replacement of MS SourceSafe. At the time Subversion sounded Chinese to me, but I kept an open mind and knowing some of the limitations of SourceSafe started looking into this open source SCM. And what a great surprise it was. The product has excellent features, it is very scalable and it is documented very well. In addition the pool of community uploads about it is growing as we speak.
The main issue with many open source projects however is that to build a system, which meets your criteria, you need to solve a little puzzle of other software modules, script run-times and UI interfaces. The first one for Subversion is how to run the application: as a share, in server mode or as Web server with Apache. In addition it is important to try out most of the less known modules and determine which one fits your personal and team preferences best.
After a week or two of playing around I prepared a short presentation for my team at Global 360. To address some of their comments and suggestions I created windows based migration tool (instead of using some of the available scripts), which proved to be very useful.
Some of the main issues I address are:
- Creating a process that consistently migrates VSS to SVN
- Preserving file and folder history with accurate date/time
- Creating an incremental export feature from VSS to SVN
- Creating VSS shared files pre processing, for easier transformation of this feature not available in SubVersion.
At the same time my colleagues from SCDNUG were looking for meeting topics, which are both engaging for the .Net developers, but not necessarily a Microsoft marketing effort. I immediately decided to put together my notes into a short presentation/tutorial. The goal is "to install Subversion in server mode with authentication and Windows integration within YY minutes". The value in this tutorial is that it concentrates specifically on Windows environment and creating a full featured development environment with automated build based on Subversion in short time.
For those of you in the Space Coast area the SCDNUG meeting is at the Space Coast Credit Union Headquarters.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Everybody else interested in this material will be able to download it from this blog soon.
Dovizhdane!
Comments
I have been searching for an option to use subversion in a MOSS 2007 environment. Specifically I am trying to find a solution that gives features like SourceForge or CodePlex. Thought your notes might help.
http://scdnug.org/files/folders/presentations/entry90.aspx
Mikhail