What is the worst source control you have used?

Question

There are many discussions about what people's favourite source control is (subversion, mercurial ...). But what source control systems have you used that you certainly wouldn't recommend? And more beneficial, how would you go about promoting change in the business to a new source control system?

A few years ago I developed using a source control system called Synergy. There were two Synergy experts in the company that constantly had to help the developers do check-ins/outs and merges were especially difficult.

What would be your steps of migrating to a better source control. Would you host everything internally or pay for services such as github?

Answer 1

The worst version control system? Definitely FTP.

Answer 2

I personally hate to use VSS. It doesnt have much features to call it a SCM tool. like SVN the most.

why dont you try SVN it is free and feature rich

Answer 3

What is the worst source control you have used?

Answer: Nothing is the worst.

Every Kind of Source Control gives you a lot of control to your code. You will hear a lot of answers, depending on whom you asked. But everything is better than nothing.

Answer 4

Yes Visual Source Safe !!!

We were few developers but still it was a hell!

Answer 5

This has to be a contender

Answer 6

PVCS. Admittedly, we use an old version here, but it makes even simple things (like seeing which files have changed in the current project etc etc etc) really difficult. It also takes ages to load the GUI and the command line interface is slow and limited unless you write your own custom programs. It's also really hard to add missing files while ignoring binaries etc. Given how good most of the free tools out there, I find it amazing that people pay for PVCS. Of course, the newer versions MAY be better...

Answer 7

Visual Source Safe.

I've used CVS, Subversion & TFS though and have been pretty happy with all of those. For me it really comes down to how well it integrates with your development environment though (Visual Studio, JBuilder, Eclipse, whatever)

Answer 8

ZIP Files

I've seen an environment where a company's developers were emailing each other archived versions of their source code in order to "share" the work.

Answer 9

I once worked for a group where our "source control" involved a series of timestamp'ed folders. That made VSS look like a major improvement.

Answer 10

None (i.e. no source control) - is the worst.

Followed closely by Visual SourceSafe

.. Ken

Answer 11

Already stated but "None" I am currently working on a very large web application and revision history is done by copying a file then renaming one of them to filename_priorto_2009_07_09_12:23:pm and then making the changes to the other one.

Answer 12

CVS

I have used only CVS, SVN and Git, so while I don't believe that CVS is the worst one out there, it's the worst one I have used.

Answer 13

1) Rational ClearCase
2) VSS

Answer 14

Once we used Groove, that is even worse than doing nothing. Groove synced folders to all teammembers. One big conflict handling and no versions of files :(

Answer 15

I can't believe that no one has suggested ClearCase. It is a clunker.

Answer 16

PVCS is by far the worst out there, an ill thought out kludge of code with zero functionality, and in the version I used we had to hack a dozen ini files to get it to work at all. I know VSS is far from perfect, but seriously it's much much better than PVCS

Answer 17

After the obvious "none" answer, second is the manual, sometime dated, copy method.

People (usually) make a copy of a file before editing it, so you finish up with a directory listing like:

grabnol_logs
grabnol_logs_tmp
grabnol_logs.20080323
grabnol_logs.20090524
grabnol_logs.31072008
grabnol_logs.andreb
grabnol_logs.new
grabnol_logs.old

Aaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!