No history to Subversion
I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where SourceSafe was kicked out.
In most cases there were long discussions on how to handle the history in SourceSafe.
Most developers seems to manage without migrating the history, but there has always been a vocal minority that desperately want to have the history migrated.
When dealing with this it has struck me that every project that was in favor of migrating the history also was missing decent release practices.
The loudest arguments are usually that they often need to check what changed between two old versions when bugs are triaged. There are usually two reasons for this. The first is that someone has to be blamed for the error. The other is that they don’t really know when the feature was released in the first place.
My recommendation usually is to set up a working release management structure before migrating the source code to a new repository. Especially if the SourceSafe repository hasn’t crashed yet.
As far as I know there is no tool that can recreate the SourceSafe history in Subversion or Team Foundation Server for all edge cases. Especially since the notion of sharing doesn’t exist in SVN or TFS.
If you know of a good tool to get the history out of a SourceSafe repository please let me know.
Old PC working again
I’ve got the old PC up and running again. It was no easy quest to find a matching motherboard for an ancient computer. I ended up buying a used board.
The current plan is to run it as a file- and svn-server mainly, but I had to keep running XP so the kids can do their stuff on it. I will probably have the svn repository on the system disk and back it up daily to the other disk. I will also make some kind of offsite backup of critical data, like source code and pictures. My free 2GB account at Diino will definitively be enough for the source code. I might even be able to ftp it to my web host. All pictures are a different story. I think I’ve got over 2GB already. On the other hand; I am thinking of moving my web site to Dreamhost and they offer a lot of space for their hosting plans.
I haven’t finally decided if I should run Subversion my self. If I go to Dreamhost I can use svn there, but then it will be unavailable when my crappy internet connection drops. It will be available when I’m not at home though, and I wont have to keep my box running all the time. That will probably save me a lot of money per year.
If only people could click more on my ads so that my internet activities become self financing. I’ve got a donation button if someone feels like helping me move to Dreamhost.
No SVN, bummer
I’m using OpenSVN to manage the source code to some of my projects, but it has been down for a couple of days now. That is a real pain. IT is (was) a free service so have expected that it would shut down eventually.
I don’t have a computer that I can run SVN on. I do all my programming on the same machine so I could possibly run SVN or (evil thought) SourceSafe on that and use Diino for external backup. But I am a bit to lazy to set up backup routines ad manage the SVN server.
The SVN host I have seen online are a bit to expensive for me. I’d gladly use a cheap one with a low up time guarantee, as long as they make some kind of guarantee.
Hmm, maybe it would be possible to sign up as a reseller for one of the big server farms and sell hosted SVN.
(Just two seconds after I posted this OpenSVN was up again but I really have to get something a little more reliable.)
OpenSVN; A free SVN repository
This is just a plug for OpenSVN a free subversion repository.
I use it for keeping my university work so I can reach it from all my computers and revert to old version of reports and source code.
Sourceforge also uses subversion, but I guess my school work doesn’t really apply as an open source project. I have logview4net hosted there though.
Edit 2009-06-28:
Since I wrote this post I have moved all my Subversion repositories, except the SourceForge ones, to my Dreamhost account.
If you enter '090OFF' as promotion code you will get $90 off of the plan you choose.
I am actually surprised that it works so well for a cheap web host.
