During Geoff's presentation I've noticed a couple of folders called 'CVS' lurking amongst his cfm files, so I decided to ask him about it. I've got a surprisingly warm endorsement for CVS (Concurrent Version System, http://www.cvshome.org/ ), which is for those of you who don't know, an open source client-server based version management solution, mainly used for collaborative software development. Basically the entire Daemon team uses it and its capabilities sound pretty impressive.
Geoff also suggested that I start a discussion / solicit opinions on CVS.So I'd like to ask everyone if you're
- using CVS
- using something else instead; or
- not using anything;
and also how many developers are in your team.
Just to repeat some of the arguments for CVS that Geoff told me: it even makes sense if you're the only developer. It allows you to roll all your code back to what it was n days ago, or roll back only selected files. You can branch your code and have different versions; it allows others to review your changes and roll them back (depending on permissions).If two people work on the same file at the same time it will report the conflict and show the changes to the file in both versions side-by-side.
You can instantly roll back your code from the alpha version you worked on in the last two weeks to the version you have in production to track down and fix a bug someone found in it. If you use it properly, the code on the development server / CVS server be stable enough to do testing on it all the time (almost like a staging server). Oh, and there are builds of the server for different OSes, and there are a few different clients to use with them (the Daemon team uses TortoiseCVS -- http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
And it's really stable and free and open source. Unfortunately it doesn't make coffee yet but can turn the kettle on for you ;)
If you have used CVS (or something similar) before these things may not sound all that new and cool to you, but it is to me since I've newer thought about using it. What do you guys use?
Also those of you who work in a group, do you develop and test on your local machine and then upload to a shared server? Or do you you just work on the shared server? We currently just share out the code directories on our shared dev server and just go for it. The only reason we get away with it is because it's only two of us coding. So before we implement CVS (I still have to sell the idea to Mark, who happens to be my boss) I'd like to hear some opinions.
Cheers Vik
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