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  • From: Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] version control software
  • Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 16:10:47 -0500

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 03:44 PM, Joey Carr wrote:

Ick... SourceSafe is a blight. It's worse than Windows, if that's
possible. For Windows environments where CVS just won't do (because your
users are afraid of a command line interface) I'd recommend StarTeam.
See starbase.com. It's proprietary, and I've gotten better support
occasionally, but all in all it's a good deal and very usable for
non-technical personnel. If most of your problem is content management
they've got this thing called "StarDisk" that connects to the StarTeam
server and looks like a network mounted file system. It's very easy for
tech-writers to grasp the whole thing. CVS, on the other hand, is much
better, but suffers from "command lines are hard" inhibitions.

I have a little experience with version control, having been on a team writing a custom cross-platform version management system for Sony back in '91, been a release engineer on a major operating system in '88, and used pretty much every version control system available since then.

I've heard good things about StarTeam. ABB paid a programmer to do a 3 month study of version control systems and after an exhaustive study he picked StarTeam. (Of course this wasn't the package eventually picked, but at least they asked.)

My personal favorite in terms of version control for software are two programs written by the same person. TeamWare, which is used by Sun to release Solaris, and BitKeeper, which is used to manage Linux kernel development, are the only two programs which manage releases rather than files. (There was a nice article about their particular approach in IEEE Software recently.)

The problem with these systems is they are targeted at software and source code, which from my experience with Sony just doesn't work well for business document management. Source code systems have most of their features targeted at all the things programmers would want, and none of the things you'd want if you were managing generic projects, or worse yet, a whole company's worth of documents. There's gotta be something better for non-programming related version control, and www.groove.net looks like its a step in the right direction.


___________________________________________________________________
The only good composer is a dead composer.
-- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC





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