Pushing the envelope

Just signed up for the 14 day free trial of Safari. Should keep me supplied with reading material for the next couple of weeks.

CVS Tools. I find the following combination of tools work very well together:

• CVS (duh) on the server.
• TortoiseCVS integrated Windows client.
• Pageant for SSH key management and passwordless connection.
• ViewCVS for a web browsable view of the repository.
• Syncmail for doing automated diffs-by-email on commits.

[Pushing the envelope]

I have a similar list, with some additional items:

• CVS command line client (because Tortoise makes 98% of your daily activities easy - the cmd line is still required for that last 2%).
• WinMerge as a slightly more user friendly diff tool.
• CVSQuery to enhance ViewCVS slightly by allowing quick searches/reports (e.g. show me all changes in the last 2 weeks for a specific module).
• Nice Tortoise icon sets (I like Timo) - let's face it, the default ones suck :)

[Joe's Jelly]

Doh! Forgot to mention WinMerge. Yes I use it as well :)

CVS Stuff.

CVS Tools. Been doing my technology evangelist / mentor bit at work this week, trying to encourage migration away from sourcesafe onto a half-decent scc system. Not having cross-platform access to our source is hampering us in so many ways. We have no budget, so I've been focussing on ways to make CVS as attractive as possible. Shamelessy stealing ideas from sourceforge, I find the following combination of tools work very well together:

• CVS (duh) on the server.
• TortoiseCVS integrated Windows client.
• Pageant for SSH key management and passwordless connection.
• ViewCVS for a web browsable view of the repository.
• Syncmail for doing automated diffs-by-email on commits.

[Pushing the envelope]

Nice collection of CVS links. I wasn't aware the TortoiseCVS did ssh CVS auth. Nothing on the website. Does it actually work? It would be HellaCool if it did :) [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]

It works fine. Just download the latest version of pageant, set up your SSH keypair on your CVS server, load your private key into pageant and use the :ext: protocol within Tortoise to access your repository. Tortoise uses a modified version of Plink (part of the PuTTY) suite so it all just works.

Source Code Control. My main complaint with CVS is that it doesn't support file renames (!!) without some kind of wacky hacks if you want to preserve the revision history of a renamed file. I find rename support to be essential when refactoring. I'm keeping a close eye on Subversion (still in alpha) which aims to address the shortcomings of CVS.[Otiose Cognitions]

I want subversion to succeed, trouble with something like source-control is that it has to be stable and reliable first and foremost - that's its job. So overcoming the initial 'new (and potentially buggy) stuff' hurdle is that much harder. Attaining critical mass will be, erm, critical.