Growing development team- issues with Dreamweaver Check In/Out

Question

Our relatively small development team is getting a bit sick of Dreamweaver. The only functionality that we're reliant on is its file check in system. As the team is likely to grow over the next few months we need to address these issues.

Subversion has come to our attention but are unsure if it will suit our requirements.

All we need is to be made aware of whether or not someone is working on a particular file before we request it from the server and to block any overriding of a checked out file.

Any recommendations or advice on general best development practices would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are a number of version control solutions you can look into. Are you sure you want to restrict people from working on similar files? Users can fork the development branch and have their own, when they check in any conflicts will need to be merged together. Some of the version controls come with tools to handle most of the conflicts for you.

It's not always a good idea to lock files that another developer may need to make modifications for. One problem you can run into is if the person with the file checkout is out of the office and their machine is inaccessible.

If that is functionality that you MUST have most of the version controls will allow you to configure your branch to work in such a way.

A few of the version controls out there are: CVS, SVN, Git, SourceSafe, ClearCase

Answer 2

The way this is generally done with SVN is to not "block" people the way you ask for : on the contrary, SVN allows for several developpers to work on the same file, and the modifications each one made are then "merged".

This merge is mostly automatic ; but when it is "too complex" (like when two developpers modified the same portion of a file), one human being has to resolve the "conflicts", indicating which modifications from which developper has to be kept.

This way of working by merges, instead of locks, seems a bit unusual at first, but once you get it (you'll need to take some time to explain your team about it, and how to use it efficiently, of course), it works really nice : I've used SVN on projects with more than 10 developpers, with absolutly no problem (a few conflicts once in a while, but you solve them and that's it).

On the other side, locking files so only one developper can work on it can block the whole team : what if one file is locked by a guy, and he goes for a coffee-break ? And at this same moment, someone else need to modify the same file to be able to work ?

For more informations about SVN, you can take a look at this online book. It give lots of useful informations :-) (you will probably not need all of that, but a quick look can do no harm ^^ )

As a sidenote, if you are developping in PHP, on a big application, an IDE like Eclipse PDT can help a lot ; and there are plugins, like Subversive, that can be used to integrate SVN access into Eclispe.

Answer 3

If you decide to use SVN with dreamweaver, there's an extension to integrate some of the commands into the ide: Subweaver

Answer 4

Subversion is ok for our team. We're trying to decide if we should lock files or use the default copy-modify-merge model. Could you give me some examples of when you would have multiple developers on the same file. It sounds a little bizzare as I can't see why it can't be a one man job.