[Dclug] Company wide deployment of version / source repository

[Larry Howe]

Where I work we are using perforce (www.perforce.com). It fits in the
middle ground between commercial systems costing $5,000 per seat and the
free ones. It costs about $600/seat. The nice thing is that we can apply
it in cases where the users are not 100% techie types. We gave the
windows gui client to some business analysts to control some crystal
reports, and it works fine that way. Couple strong points about it:

- great for cross-platform, has GUI clients for linux, mac, and even
windows.
- has command line clients for all platforms also.
- good comprehensive documentation.
- excellent tech support, respond to emails in about an hour.
- time-lapse view: move a slider and watch how your code has evolved
over time.
- revision graph: see how different files and codelines are related to
each other. From the graph you can call up info about each revision,
view the revision, etc.
- annotated view: get a listing of your code where each line is
annotated with who changed it and under which changelist.
- integrates with windows explorer, do most version control operations
from a right-click menu in explorer.
- great integration with eclipse. Open your project in eclipse and if
you start to edit a file, it automatically checks it out for you(!).
- integrates with defect tracking tools: bugzilla, clearquest, jira,
quality center, etc. We used to use bugzilla and it was great to have
the origin of a bug, how it was evaluated, the decision to work on it,
what was done, the lines of code that were changed, who tested it, and
when it was released, all in one place.
- additional features for web development, like automatic deployment of
promoted changes to the web server, and, the ability to see what the web
site looked like at any time in history.

Overall, we're happy with it, we feel like it has done everything we've
asked it to and not let us down.

Larry

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 12:35 -0400, Eric Maag wrote:
> Group mind,
> 
> I just started a new job recently and one of the things that I
> realized that aside from simple check in / check out, via .lock files
> in Dreamweaver there is no source control / versioning at the the
> company. The line of business is primarily web development using
> several systems / development frameworks. The team is not all that big
> (8 people) so it wouldn't have to be anything too complex. I've worked
> w/CVS previously, but I've heard that there's some nicer apps out
> there. So if anyone can chime in w/their 2 c, I'd appreciate it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Eric Maag
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