In the middle of updating some code I decided that I needed rollback possibilities and the ability to offer alpha and beta code as it is being developed. Enter version control. My previous experiences are with Visual Source Safe and Bitkeeper. Neither of these is free and we are on a budget. So I looked to open source CVS. the first thing I saw was that Subversion is a better CVS. So I decided to give this a try first. Well finding a web host with CVS installed proved to be a pain. Those that advertise CVS or Subversion have mediocre web hosting and want double the cost of average hosting. Luckily for us Hivemindz is hosted on a web host that has CVS installed. This is cool because now the main site can be put on CVS control. By having version control the code for the hivemindz.com site can be offered to members . Something many have asked for in the past.

The search for a good cvs client was narrowed down to tortoiseCVS and Wincvs. I don't care what anyone says, Windows is the best desktop and development OS for me and I refuse to give it up. So I installed tortoiseCVS client. I immediatly did not like it. TortoiseCVS is a explorer integrated program. Such programs are total crap in the long and short run. Too dependant on windows and likely to cause problems from the start. You also have to restart Windows and watch as possible conflicts occur and things in Windows stop working. Even if this does not occur, after installing 5 or 6 context menu programs you get a 12 inch high context menu where things are impossible to find. The whole point to context menus are to speed things up by making links easy to find. This is the same reason I dislike WSFTP Pro. I can't understand why those that are faithfully against Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer into Windows are the same ones putting out open source that intergrates with Windows. They suck!

tortoiseCVS is not easy

Well, my fears were manifested in the fact that none of the module creation context menus for tortoiseCVS appeared in windows 2003. So what do you do when something like this happens? Well I uninstall. Because there is obviously something in windows that would need to be changed to get this to work. I repeat. Windows integrated programs suck!! So it is off to Wincvs and hopefully a better weekend of installation.

WinCVS

WinCVS was not the savior that I though it would be. Using SSH to login was unsuccessful because winCVS could not determine the SSH type and would fail to connect properly. Repository login did not show at all but WinCVS acted as though a login had been accomplished. This was nerve racking since click on the logout button produced command errors.

Enter the SmartCVS client

The real hero in this was SmartCVS. This is not an open source project but they have a foundation edition available for non-commercial use. What a great program! It is simple to use and has a bunch of user interface features that remove all the uncertainty of not knowing command line CVS. It shows all the information that one needs to know at a glance. There is a very nice graphic repository browser that shows things in a tree style format. You can use the "export backup" function to create a zip file of the project. The settings area includes many reminder checkboxes for housekeeping CVS functions like log messages. There is a profile manager that remembers so that you can use several different repositories without having to configure the connection variables everytime. There are more features with the professional version and they are not just bloat and worth paying for the license. SmartCVS runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

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