It's hard to explain to people, who aren't techies, why I, as a programmer, don't have the latest and greatest software installed asap.
I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.
> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.
1st reaction: Horrified that you are still using VSS.
2nd reaction: Was that if it does what you need it to, well, then, who am I to judge? It doesn't matter whether the tool was created yesterday or 20 years ago.
3rd reaction: Does it really do what you need it to do? I would guess that maybe svn/git has some simple featured that would significantly improve your life.
4th reaction: Wasn't VSS known as being super buggy? Is it just luck that you've escaped failure in 20 years?
I've used git on several hosts and subversion back in the day. I have no problem learning new things. Tortoise, bitbucket, github, beanstalk to name a few.
I think your reaction is more horrifying than me not having a compelling reason to change the way I've been doing things without flaw for decades.
So long as it works for you, thats great - I just hope you have a migration path if/when it stops working.
I do however get the objection to newer is better, I keep getting besieged to move my projects from svn to git - to which I usually respond "Why, tell me what feature we need in git, that svn doesn't do?" I've yet to get an answer.
If you "keep getting besieged to move [your] projects from svn to git", I can guess that who is asking is probably downstream consumers of your projects. What they might actually be wanting:
- Familiarity. Everyone uses git nowadays; like it or not, svn projects are the odd ones out.
- Fast, offline querying of the project's history. With git, they have a full copy of the project's history in their local computer, while with svn, any query has to go to the server. This helps a lot when chasing regressions, or just when browsing the changes between one release and the other.
- Easy branching. Branches in git are more lightweight than branches in svn, and git's merge functionality is quite good. When they want to propose some change to your code, they can just create a branch in their local copy, make the changes they want, publish the branch somewhere, and ask you to merge it; this is made even easier by sites like github. With svn, unless they have an account in your svn server, they have to do it the old-fashioned way.
I'm not trying to be mean. If one is going to stick with an obsolete source control system--as an important part of one's work process--there should be a good reason for doing so; however, one cannot make such a justification based on ignorance of the alternatives unless the two hours to learn, e.g., git, cannot be spared and would not be recouped in future productivity.
I don't know if they fixed VSS in later versions, but I used it in a team environment from 2000-2002, and heard of other people using it similarly even later than that (including for art assets as well as code...), seemingly without any problems.
As well as the oft-unjustly-maligned check in/check out model, two other things it has going for it are that administration is pretty easy and it has both a command line client and a GUI client. (Which might sound like a ridiculous thing to say, but I have used some systems that have one but not the other - hopefully very rare these days though.)
This isn't really a recommendation for it, though, unless they've put a huge amount of work into it over the past fifteen-odd years (which somehow I doubt).
To get the same check in/check out workflow, you could try Perforce (though I heard from somebody that did it on AWS that the initial setup can be a bit fiddly) or SVN (though check in/check out evidently isn't quite how it's designed to be used, because (a) this is not the default, and (b) the performance can be pretty crappy).
Yeah, for real. People think that, like grease monkeys, people who work with computers, and like them, should have the latest and greatest whatever the hell app is going around. Because you know it's going around, like measles. Others, like worser diseases.
A friend and I, him no longer on Facebook, me without it at this point, both have stickies on our cameras all day that we peel off to talk on Facetime. And as we were chatting, he mentioned someone who was a power user but didn't know much. He was downright promiscuous with the software he used, just, terrible. He never even thought of reading a EULA, had every app that fit on his phone (while my friend and I want nothing to do with smartphones), knew how to use all the features...Perhaps we're slightly paranoid users, but it's these tiny religions that keep us from spilling our guts to the whole planet. And it happens, and there's no undo. I know what computers can do, and it's not fun to think about what happens when yours is commandeered. Especially if you look at the situation antagonistically and as a programmer.
I think of old applications, and old computers, the way I think of generic pills: you know what you're getting, the luster is gone from the competitor that once made it look like shit based on vaporware promises, you can trust it no problem, and it's super cheap. And you're used to it, you know the rules, you know how it works. New hardware is expensive, but new software is worse: you pay either in loss of data, highly-targeted advertising, price discrimination when you finally buy something, irresponsibility with data, worrying about getting hacked, getting hacked, countermeasures, getting spammed, or in a mundane but expensive way as with the $5 a month that Danish guy said every app should charge. But most apps just can't man up and charge you a fee, or tell you to go screw, instead, they play it sleazy, they want to traffic a tiny part of you.
> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.
Wait! What?! Make sure you do not run out of disk space or do any of the other things that instantly corrupt your VSS repo. Hopefully you were being sarcastic.
I'm amazed that you find VSS reliable. Everybody I've known who used it back in the 90s (including my team) had to dump it because it so easily got corrupted. Aside from git and mercurial, you can use Perforce personal for free.
Wow, the vitriol is thick tonight. I also work in teams and like I said in the other comment, I use different flavors of version control on those projects.
I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.