Some VSS to Subversion notes.

Blake Winton

From various places around the net. (Hint: Google "vss to subversion".)

  • Lock-modify-unlock for Svn. Not that that's what I think we should bd doing, but if I've got to sell it, and that's a sticking point, at least I have an answer now.
  • Subversion is said to be much faster. "Our CC.NET build went from 3 minutes to 35 seconds for whole tree!!!!" I haven't looked up how much of our nightly build time is spent getting files from VSS, but I seem to remember it's not inconsiderable, and that step has been failing more often recently, so if we can make it both faster and more reliable, that'll be a good selling point.
  • Ankhsvn (Wow, what a horrible front page! If I were Greg Wilson, and grading them on it, they'ld get a 51%. I mean, it's there, so I'm not going to fail you, but for the love of Pete, hire a graphic designer, or look at the other two links in this entry, or something. Please.) or PushOK or VisualSVN for Visual Studio integration, but everyone seems to use TortoiseSvn. I wonder if there's something similar for OSX? Fortunately, Eclipse integration is good enough that I don't really mind falling back to the command line client when I have to, but still.
  • A presentation on "Replacing SourceSafe with SubVersion".
  • A Perl script (shudder) to migrate your VSS repository to svn.

And there you go. Management has been feeling the pain recently, and the Server Team Lead seems onboard with the idea, so we might actually make the change. Exciting times.