Your experience on using configuration & VCS tools

Question

I am doing my study's final year project and would like to do a little survey here. The topic is about configuration management and version control system for an industrial product (such as a piece of software, a furniture design, a car engine or even an aeroplane design etc...)

1.) What is you field of expertise (IT, engineering, manufactuing etc..) and what is the configuration management and version control system you use (previously or now) for your work?
2.) What is your opinion/comment (good, bad, what is it lack of or what can be improve etc...) about them? Much appreciated if you can include some real life examples for your opinion/comment.

Of course you are welcome also if you simply wish to share your thought on the current configuration management and version control system in market.
Thanks all in advance for your help.

Answer 1

I'm in the Computer Security field, and we use Perforce. It's pretty good for my needs (I'm a Development Manager) - supports easy branching (not as easy as git, but we don't really need something that flexible), the conflict resolution is pretty good, and the command-line tool lends itself to easy scripting.

The downside is the price - from what I hear, P4 is rather pricey (I'm not involved in purchasing, so I don't know the specifics), and I don't think we're getting anything out of perforce that couldn't be found in an open-source solution (again, I look at git). However, we're a large (>1000 person) software development company, we have offices scattered across the world, and perforce is quite entrenched already, so I don't think we'll be switching any time soon.

In the past, I've used Perforce at a different company and Visual Source Safe (awful!).

Answer 2

I'm not sure this is a good topic for SO... In any case:

For developing software we're very happy with git. If your developers are particularly inexperienced or you have "people who need graphical user interfaces" on your team you might be happier with Subversion.

For tracking our system configuration files (DNS, puppet, nagios, that sort of thing) we use Subversion.

Answer 3

About tracking configuration files with version control system: that is not what VCS are for, but for example for Git there are many tools built on top of Git to manage configuration files: IsiSetup, etckeeper, and other that can be found e.g. on http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/InterfacesFrontendsAndTools web page.