Can someone offer please a free software that will be able to replace VSS 2005 for me? I can't afford to pay for it.
Thanks.
There are lots - which one you should use depends on the specifics of how you work.
At the moment my personal favourite is Mercurial which is distributed - there is a very good introduction to how using distributed version control works here - Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial.
I personally find that distributed version control works really well for me, but if you are looking for something that behaves a little more like VSS then you might want to look into alternatives such as Subversion which is widely used and very mature.
ok there are a ton. I would suggest using the googly and doing a search for something like open source source control. Take a look here.
Although, there are plenty, I would recommend you to try SVN, it's a centralized SVN and comes very close to Visual Source Safe, I see that the recommended answer recommends Mercurial, but it looks like SVN will work out for anybody that want to move over. We did a massive migration a year back from VSS to SVN without any issues.
Can you recommend one over another?
For Windows and Linux (It also partially work on Mac, look at the comment of Nicholas Riley to this answer) there is TortoiseHG clone of the excelent TortoiseSVN
The great thing about theses two is that they are integrated in the shell (Windows Explorer or Nautilus). You see small icons over your files and folder that inform you about the status of your file in regards to the repository and you have a collection of commands/tools accessible from the context menu on theses files.
I like Murky. There is another that's okay but not quite as good called SourceTree.
There's also MacHg, which I was introduced to recently.
Take a look at mercurial page for GUI tools and integrations to IDE: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/OtherTools
For Windows I use HgWin tool (http://www.newsupaplex.pp.ru/hgwin_news_eng.html), which provide a GUI for the most of mercurial commands. It is similar to hgtk, but uses mercurial command line client (hg.exe) as backend.
What is the simplest (to install and use) git client for Windows nowadays?
msysgit and TortoiseGit / GitCheetah
Apart from others have already said, there is also SmartGit.
msysgit is, like everyone else said, wonderful.
You should also look into Git Extensions for visual studio integration, which I find I can't live without.
I just use the one in Cygwin, although many people are looking forward to msysgit once its out of the preview stage. If they make it a no-brainer to install (like in Cygwin), it would be nice.
I had serious issues with negotiating SSL connections with msygit+putty. It's so much easier on cygwin. I even wrote up a guide on it. See Windows Git Tutorial: Cygwin, SSH and Projectlocker.
I am developing an application for the Mac as a small team (me + another person) effort. We are located in different cities, and have started to see the need for solid source control management.
None of us have any experience with this, and both of us are relatively new to Cocoa/Obj-C/Xcode (but do have C knowledge).
Does anyone have any recommendations as to which SCM system to choose? I understand that a lot of people are using Subversion, which is also supported in Xcode 3.1. Does anyone have experience with using Subversion through Xcode? Or is it a better option to chose a stand alone GUI alternative, such as Versions?
Grateful for any input on this.
Gregor Tomasevic,
Sweden
Update/personal experiences:
Since this post, we have tried Versions and Cornerstone (both of which are SVN GUI-clients), as well as Xcodes built-in support for SVN. We were not particularly pleased with Versions, which seemed to have some problems with committing unversioned files/build files. The built-in SVN support in Xcode works quite well, although it probably has limitations that we have still not run into. Cornerstone is both simple to use and powerful, and does not seem to suffer from the problems we encountered with Versions.
So far, we have just tried committing, updating repo, checking out latest/previous versions of our files and worked some with file comparison. It might be a whole different ball game once you start working extensively with branching, an area which we have been told both these GUI clients might have some weaknesses in.
For what it's worth (and with only days of evaluation) Cornerstone seems to be a somewhat better alternative, although for simpler SCM, Xcode works well too.
Thanks for all the comments.
Xcode only supports Subversion, Perforce, and CVS. However, there are also distributed version control systems out there, such as Mercurial, Bazaar, and Git. These have no Mac-native GUIs, but you should still consider them. Personally, I love managing my projects in Mercurial repositories.
[Added 2011-03-10] Xcode 4 adds support for Git. Several of us have filed requests for Mercurial support; you should, too, if you want it.
There is a nice GUI frontend for Mercurial on Mac called MacHG: http://jasonfharris.com/machg/
It is free and very nice IMHO.
You can't really go wrong with using Subversion.
If, like me, you don't like Xcode's SVN integration too much you can always choose to use the command-line tools, or one of the several GUI apps like Versions, CornerStone or SvnX. Most of these tools work together pretty well, so you're not necessarily tied in to the tool you start out with.
I personally do most of my work with Versions, and use the command-line tools with the same working copies every once in a while.
If you're comfortable working with command-line tools exclusively until someone creates a good GUI app around it, git is a pretty viable option too.
disclosure: I'm one of the people who work on Versions, so I might be slightly biased ;)
Xcode's Subversion support is pretty good. 90% of the SVN activities I perform are easily doable from Xcode. For the other few things I just fire up Terminal.
There are a couple things in their SVN client implementation that are annoying:
The code that checks to see which local files have been modified seems to run on a background timer, and its pretty latent. Sometime it takes 5 minutes for Xcode to show a file as modified. The same thing is even more exaggerated w/r/t remote modifications.
Sometimes when you rename or delete a file that isn't under source control, a dialog will appear, asking "Do you wish to [rename/delete] this file in SVN as well?" And the options are "Yes" or "Cancel." You choose Yes out of desperation only to be presented with a well-deserved SVN error.
Overall, I'd recommend it.
Caveat: If you simply tell XCode to add a project to a repository by giving it the top-level dir, it WILL add the build directory to the repository, which of course is a terrible thing to do.
In order to get around this you have to move the build dir to another location so that XCode won't try to import it, or manually add the discrete folders of a project one by one.
Subversion is the traditional OS X source control solution, in Leopard it's supported in Xcode and OS X, not to mention the third party GUI apps (a few of which look very slick). Despite all of this though, a lot of the independent OS X developers have switched to Git over the past year or two. As a single developer I can tell you Git has turned out to be a very good solution for me, and along with Github it makes a great solution for a small team effort.
If you're interested in using Mercurial on OS X, try SourceTree, it's not free but it's competitively priced and has a very polished Mac OS feel. I've been using it for personal projects for the last few months on and off and find it intuitive and reasonably robust.
It's available through the Mac App Store and supports Git and Mercurial. They have a website at http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ with more information.
If your going for subversion, I've heard good things said about Springloops. I code together with some friends too in a similar fashion and we use Github. Git is such a wonderful experience. I don't use any GUI for it since I'm much more efficient with a shell prompt. But of course, I'd welcome if Xcode had support for Git repos.
Mercurial (like git) is "distributed" and perhaps regarded as more modern and up-and-coming than svn (but less established). If you want to auto-checkin using mercurial, you can add the line:
hg commit -m "Xcode auto commit"
as part of a "Run Script" stage of the XCode build, as found in:
Project > New Build Phase > New Run Script BUild Phase
I use : https://bitbucket.org/hsivank/xcode4-with-mercurial/wiki/Home
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I'm trying to find a source control for my own personal use that's as simple as possible. The main feature I need is being able to read/pull a past version of my code. I am the only developer. I've looked at a lot of different version control systems, but they all seem way more complicated than I need. I need one that's simple, runs under Windows, and doesn't expose itself to the network.
Specifically, the version control system should not require exposing an HTTP interface, it should interact with the local filesystem only. It just needs to be a version control system geared for one guy and one guy only. Graphical UI is a plus.
Does anyone know of software would satisfy what I'm looking for?
Thanks!
-Mike
Subversion is great -- you can run the server yourself or use something like assembla.com to host your code (although that exposes it to the network).
There are numerous gui applications like tortoise svn that would allow you to interact w/ the source control repo
From what I understand, and at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, you might want to consider a DVCS (distributed version control system) like git or mercurial. They essentially take away the central repository part, so it should be ideal to use when you're a solo developer.
Another advantage is that when you decide to add people to your one-man team, you don't have to set up a central repository. All they have to do is clone your repository and they're good to go!
If you're windows based and are used to a shell plugin like TortoiseSVN I'd pick mercurial. Their windows integration is just a bit better than git's, using TortoiseHg. The git counterpart (cheetah) is on hold at the moment, due to the developer getting sick and tired of all the demands people were making ;-)
If DVCS is too exotic for this situation you could always rely on SVN. I've heard good stories about the already mentioned VisualSVN solution. Install, make some repositories and go. Install TortoiseSVN for shell integration, or perhaps Subclipse or ankhSVN for eclipse and visual studio, respectively.
Note: I have not actually tried git or mercurial in a real life project, just some test setups. I now have a simple project WITH version control (using mercurial in my case), without having to have access to a central repository.
Sourcegear Vault is free for a single user and you can run both the client and the server on your own machine.
Subversion with TortoiseSVN.
Like all version control systems, it will sound reasonably complex when you start off, but it's really very simple once you get into it, works well for a single developer, and doesn't require any network access if you don't want it to.
Plus, it's free.
For what it's worth, you can use Subversion & TortoiseSVN without a server using file:/// URLs to connect to you repository. I've done this to create repositories on USB thumb drives that I can move from machine to machine.
Here's a nice write-up: http://www.fredshack.com/docs/tortoisesvn.html
I use the free (2 user?) licence of Perforce. Powerful, fast, and well documented.
I'm a very satisfied user msysgit for Windows. It contains a recent copy of git as well as a GUI, a shell and a history browser in a single install package.
No need for a server component and if you do decide to host it somewhere your repository is signed and cannot be modified by the hoster without you seeing it. Finally, moving the repo to a server is a easy "push" operation which keeps all of your history.
You really can't get much easier than VisualSVN for version control on Windows.
I like to use Google Code, even for my one man projects, as it provides a Subversion repository already set up. Also, the server is offsite, which protects against hard drive failures and other disasters.
You might find Mercurial to be pretty nice for that purpose. You won't have to set up a server and creating the repository is as simple as doing "hg init" in the directory where your work is.
All the previous suggestions are pretty simple, and I know cvs is a bit out of vogue these days, but I like to use it's local mode for a repository that doesn't even need a server to install or set up. The repository can be anywhere on your hard drive. I have mine on a memory stick to have access to it anywhere even without an internet connection.
The key commands are:
cvs -d:local:/full/path/repository init
to create the repository
mkdir /full/path/repository/project
to create the module, and
cvs -d:local:/full/path/repository/cvs co project
to check out a local version.
TortoiseCVS gives you your Graphical UI
Bazaar. See Bazaar in five minutes for a great start.
Whenever you save a file, run the $ bzr commit -m "Added first line of text" command, and it's all taken care.
If you edit over FTP, make the FTP folder as a drive or folder, and bzr update after the commit.
+1 for Subversion, for those not familiar with it I would recommend the SVN Book.
VisualSVN Server is a complete installer for Subversion Server on Windows.
VisualSVN is a Visual Studio plugin for Subversion integration.
You could go with Mercurial.
It's very easy to start working with and there's TortoiseHg which integrates nicely with Windows shell.
You don't need a server for it as it's a distributed version control system - you can hold a whole repository copy on a flash drive and push/pull changes from it.
If you wish, you can put hg in a web server mode that makes the repository easily accessible over http.
As opposed to SVN and CVS, it doesn't spread its metadata directories all over the repository. There's just one .hg directory in repository root.
I use it daily and love it!
I use Subversion and TortoiseSVN — both are free. Your repository can be on the local machine. You don't have to work over a network.
However, for disaster recovery or even simple machine fault, it's probably a good idea to store your repository on a different computer and also back it up.
You might want to consider using a third party service to host your repositories off-site over the internet. I use CVSDude and am satisfied.
I am also a lone developer, and I use Subversion and TortoiseSVN.
Setup of Subversion is quick and painless; it can be done in less than half an hour including setting up the repository.
There is no requirement by Subversion to run on a server, I actually run it on my local machine and keep my repositories on a separate drive. Connecting to the repository uses svn:// instead of http://. I'm not sure why you require that it does not expose itself to the network, but this would be a matter of security via obscurity. I'm sure networking experts could suggest better methods for locking it down, should that be necessary.
Once the repository has been created, commits and updates from the repository are as simple as right-clicking on a folder in Windows Explorer.
Any distributed revision control system is best for lone developers, like git or Mercurial. Best thing is you can incorporate more developers to your project seamlessly, as opposed to having to give them access to your main centralized SVN or CVS repository.
SVN and TortoiseSVN work for me. Definitely ensure you have offsite backup.
You might want to check out the wiki article Comparison of revision control software. A (slightly hard-to-read) comparison tool might help. You might enjoy If Version Control Systems Were Airlines.
I came here looking for the same thing, and I saw someone suggest Google Code. I tried it out, and it was brain dead easy to set up. Exactly what I was looking for. Works like a charm with TortoiseSVN (my favorite).
I came here for a solution, Google Code was all set up in about 2 minutes. You can choose SVN, git, or mercurial for your version control.
You should check CVSNT as server and use any of the clients you would like (standalone or integrated with your IDE). There are plenty of them.
Use Visual SVN to setup your server and then use Tortoise to access your repository. Both are free to use and we have been successfully using it for quite sometime now.
#gorgapor: Doesn't the Google Code TOS specify an open source license? It's not a generally applicable solution in that case.
I haven't seen anyone mention Perforce. Perforce allows you to use their software for up-to 2 users for free. You can run the server and clients in the same machine, which will give you the environment that you want.
This is much the same question as Source control system for single developer
The bottom line is: yes there is. More than one.
My opinion is that SVN will do just fine. it does for me in similar cases, as described here: Single serving source control
I have heard of a hosted Subversion vendor Versionshelf (http://www.versionshelf.com) on a podcast I listen to.
This site also has a list: http://snook.ca/archives/servers/hosted_subversion/