What arguments can be made to a client/boss for SUN Teamware -> modern SCM migration?

Question

The team where I work still uses SUN Teamware for Source Code Management (SCM). I've worked with it for a while now (over 10 months) and I don't have any particular complaints about it.

Teamware has been used to manage Sun’s largest source trees, including those for the Solaris operating system and the Java system, and it works pretty well. But it is also an old commercial (closed-source) product that has been discontinued. This came as part of the process of Sun converting their code bases to open source communities which by its turn led to moving to newer revision control systems such as Mercurial.

This makes me feel a bit like we've got stuck in time using Teamware and the world has moved on to newer systems. I do not however miss any particular functionality except maybe having a web view of the source tree to navigate through and see the history of files (something we do with the VersionTool so not critical).

Should a team using SUN Teamware migrate to a SCM more modern like git or Mercurial?

And more important, what arguments can you present to the rest of the team to support that transition?

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of SCM but I have to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Until Teamware no longer meets your needs, continue to use it.

Answer 2

Reading between lines, I guess that even you have no real argument except the personal feeling to be left from current trends. Unfortunately this is not an argument for migrating a big code base from one SCM to the other.

I you want to stay up to date, you still can play with git/Mercurial/Bazaar at home.

Answer 3

Did you see the evaluations that Sun did of:

• git (note they evaluated an old 1.2.4 version. Main point: FAST),
• Mercurial (), and
• Bazaar

as candidates to replace the Sun Teamware VCS for the Solaris code base ?

That may gave some ideas about topics to evaluate when thinking about a migration.

Some other topics are listed in this Git Survey 2007-2008.