Installing a source control without admin rights

Question

I'm forced to use SourceSafe at my job. There is no way this is going to change. I would like to use another source control for my own need in parallel. I want to be able to keep an history of my modifications, branch easily and merge. I can install any application that doesn't requires admin rights. I cannot install Python or anything that integrates in File Explorer.

I'm not much of a command line guy so a GUI is a must. I managed to install Mercurial but not TortoiseHG. There is a chance msysgit would install but the GUI isn't very good.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

you can install svn command line just by unzipping it, but if you want TortoiseSVN for the GUI then I you may need admin rights, not sure. But you don't need a separate gui if your IDE supports SVN, like Eclipse or any other java IDE does.

Answer 2

I would check out SourceGear Vault, it has SourceSafe Import and SourceSafe Feature support. This may need admin rights though...

Answer 3

Another tack is to synchronize a copy of the directory to another machine where you do have some rights. I would recommend rsync -- I think there are several Windows versions available.

On this other machine you can now use whatever tools you like. I know it's a kludge, but then so is working on a system where you aren't even trusted enough to install something like Python.

Answer 4

Git has a pretty nice command-line interface with color and auto-completion. After reading the Pro Git Book I found the command-line is great.

There is GUI bundled with it. It is nice for viewing logs and merges but may be not to your taste. There is also a TortoiseGit shell extension (like the famous TortoiseSVN), but that would require admin privileges to install (as opposed to Git portable).

Answer 5

AFAIK any TortoiseXX will need admin rights as it needs to hook up explorer.exe to use it. you should still be able to use hgtk part of tortoisehg to get at the windows though

Answer 6

There is no way this is going to change

I don't mean to say that you should shout your head off about how svn, or whatever, is great, and moan about VSS all the time. But I find it hard to believe that a well-reasoned proposal to switch to a newer, better version control system outlining the pitfalls of VSS (no security - all users have write access to the history of everything, for example) would be ignored.

If you can't install programs that integrate with explorer, then using any version control system is going to mean learning to use it from the command line!

Answer 7

Check out bazaar (bzr). I've not used it personally but it claims to have an excellent gui which may mean you don't need a TortoiseXX install.

Answer 8

Install and use a Virtual Machine product and go crazy with whatever you want, then look for another job.

Answer 9

Just use a version control tool from the command line. It isn't painful and it can be automated quite easily via your existing tools. SVN isn't going to be great when interacting with an existing version control system (it is finicky about files/directories being deleted, renamed etc), whereas the DVCS tools (I prefer Mercurial) are much smarter about it.

My recommendation: Use Mercurial. It has sane ignore rules so it can be trained to ignore VSS cruft, a single .hg directory that contains all the VC data, and easy branching (which will help you change gears more often). git is fine too, but has a steeper learning curve.