![]() ![]() One of the paid client-server version control systems, Perforce (more on this below), had some traction at enterprise-scale companies, notably Google, but for those unwilling to pay the price for it, SVN was a good option. SVN is a free, open-source version of this model. This model worked great for a centrally located team that eventually shipped a release, whether as a disc or a download. And everything existed as directories-files, branches, tags, etc. Important files, particularly large binaries, could be “locked” to prevent other developers from changing them while you worked on them. Branches were rare and eventually absorbed into the mainline. A piece of software would be built as a central repository, with any and all feature additions merged into a trunk. This earlier generation of version control worked great for the way software was built ten to fifteen plus years ago. In fact, SVN build on historical version control-it was initially intended to be a mostly compatible successor to CVS (Concurrent Versions System), which is itself a front end and expansion to Revision Control System (RCS), initially released way back in 1982. This client server model is an older style, compared to the distributed model git uses, where changes can be stored locally then distributed to the central history (and other branches) when pushed to an upstream repository. Subversion (SVN) is an open-source version control system that maintains source code in a central server anyone looking to change code accesses these files from clients. ![]() This article will look at what those version control systems are and why they still have a hold of some engineering teams. Stack Overflow engineering has used both of these in the past, though we now use git like almost everybody else. There was a time when both of these were prominent in the market, but not everyone remembers those days. This year, we asked what version control systems people used, and git came out as the clear overall winner.īut it’s not quite a blow out there are two other systems on the list: SVN (Apache Subversion) and Mercurial. While technology has shifted and improved quite a bit since then git has come out as the dominant choice for version control systems. Microsoft discontinued VSS in 2005, coincidently the same year as the first release of Git. In essence, VSS was a shield on top of a shared file folder. That file would be locked until you checked it back in no one else could edit it. If you wanted to work on one of those files, you had to check it out from the repo-literally, like a library book. We used Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe (VSS), which had a repository of all the files needed for a release, which was then burned onto a disk and sent to people through the mail. At my first job out of college (pre-Y2K), I got my first taste of version control systems. ![]()
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