Source control - VSS 2005 or Subversion?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Reasons to use Subversion over MS Source Safe

I'm looking to implement source control for my personal projects. I am the only user so concurrency requirements are little to nothing, but who knows maybe i'll hire someone to help me in future work so it would be nice to implement something that will scale if I need it to. I'm looking at Visual Source Safe 2005 and Subversion at the moment. Free is also a requirement - since I have an msdn subscription I get VSS, and Subversion is open source.

What are your experiences with these products? What do you recommend? Any other thoughts?

Answer 1

Something tells me that you're going to get a massive surge of advocates for Subversion and a lot of people not wanting to see VSS. I would be one of those people, since the last time I tried to use VSS it gave me nothing but heartache and despair.

Answer 2

The only real complaints about VSS that I have are related to multiple users. The integration with Visual Stuido for VSS is so nice that I would give that quite a bit of weight in my decision. However, if you plan to branch out, or want to use the same system for larger projects, then Subversion may be a better choice.

Answer 3

Stay away from Visual SourceSafe in any form. My favourite article on this topic is Visual SourceSafe: Microsoft's Source Destruction System.

Subversion is an excellent choice, especially for somebody new to version control. I hear that VisualSVN makes Subversion easy to set up in Windows.

Answer 4

I think Subversion is more stable then any version of Visual SourceSafe. :)

You can also take a look at SourceGear Vault. It is (at least, it used to be, I hope it's still the case) free for single user licenses. It uses SQL Server as a backend.

Answer 5

I think we can all agree that there is little to recommend VSS, even if you get it "free" with your MSDN subscription. My question back to you is, why limit yourself to subversion?

See @Mark Harisson's answer in this SO question for a quick comparison of different source control utilities. Many are free, and just because you are a solo dev now, does not mean that you will not need some of the more advanced features as your projects grow in complexity.

Answer 6

I strongly recommend to go for subversion. Not only because of the "concurrency" support (VSS also supports simultaneous checkouts by different people), but also because of the far superior support for branching and merging.

With client tools such as TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN (Visual Studio integrated), working with SVN is really nice.

We were using VSS until 2 years ago and then switched to SVN - I think no one in our team would ever go back.

Answer 7

Subversion, hands down.

Answer 8

I strongly recommend subversion even for personal projects. It is more easy to work with branches and that's a very nice approach even if you are working alone. Nowadays AnkhSVN is a very nice plug in you can use with Visual Studio. VSS is heavy and painful to start. With AnkhSVN you don't feel anything.

I start use subversion I will never go back to VSS.

Try avoid TortoiseSVN on the same machine. Take the command line into account to make repositories and security settings. Sometimes TortoiseSVN & AnkhSVN don't work well together. If you change anything with one you can't commit with the another. Nevertheless you'll make mistakes and spend a boring time to fix.

You may want have a look at www.visualsvn.com. The Visual SVN Server is amazing, there is no best tool avaible on my view. And you can combine AnkhSVN (free client tool) with this Visual SVN Server (free server tool).

That's it!