64 Visual SourceSafe (Commercial Configuration Management Tools)
Description
This article is from the Configuration Management Tools FAQ, by Dave Eaton dwe@arde.com with numerous contributions by others.
64 Visual SourceSafe (Commercial Configuration Management Tools)
SourceSafe provides for true project level configuration control. In
1995, SourceSafe was taken over by Microsoft and re-named. According
to their sales office, Microsoft added conversion utilities from Delta
and PVCS. The 4.0 release includes support for long filenames and UNC
paths, a tab dialog for setting options, localization into 5
languages, a Windows95 look and feel, and tight integration into
Visual Basic, Visual C, Visual Test, and Fortran PowerStation.
It has a very nice model for setting up multiple versions of a
project. The key commands are the share, branch, merge, links, and
paths commands. Rather than using numbers to branch, such as version
2.3.6.1 in SCCS, a logical release or customer name can be used to
implement the same construct. SourceSafe also runs on many platforms
so it can be used for a client/server project where coding is being
done on a Windows PC using Visual Basic, and on a UNIX workstation
using C. It is competitively priced and easy to install and configure.
The Microsoft System Journal (May, 1993) named SourceSafe as the best
Windows based configuration mangement tool. The SourceSafe label
command can be used to take a snapshot of the entire project, assign
that version a name. The operation is rapid, even if there are 2000
programs in the project. SourceSafe integrates with VisualStudio which
automates checkin/checkout of code as developers work with files.
Several mid and high end defect-tracking tools integrate with
SourceSafe.
It has been reported that a user can access several projects at one
time in SourceSafe, but that SourceSafe security is not very
elaborate; it only has 4 levels of security: read-only, checkout, add,
and destroy. This may be sufficient for some projects, but not for
others. SourceSafe does not deal with project building (interfacing
with Makefiles and compiling, for example). It also does not interface
with a problem tracking tool, although that may be in the works. There
have been numerous reports posted on the newsgroup of corrupted
SourceSafe data repositories, particularly with large repositories or
when the disk containing it begins to become full.
A supplier WWW site is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ssafe/
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