Why I want to use CVS and automated builds
We currently use Visual Source Safe at work and it is a bit of an old clunky thing. It might be because we are using an old version of it or whether it's just rubbish but I want to change to CVS.
I tried (all to briefly) before to look at setting up CVS but I gave up because I had to finish some work and I couldn't find any documentation to tell me how to easily install the thing.
I also want to move to CVS is because you can easily integrate it with Eclipse.
I have been thinking recently that it's about time I tried looking at it again. The main driving force behind my ambition to change to CVS is so I can create an automated build. The build at the moment has improved a lots and it's almost automatic except everyone runs it in their own development environment and it points to their own code. It also doesn't manually check out the code from repository. These has meant we are not always working with the latest code and we also tend to have our own files mixed in with the latest files which can often hide dependencies, which we don't find out about until someone else tries to build the code.
If we can get CVS in we can then setup an automatic build of the latest code which if nothing else should see if the code compiles and then I can setup Ant to run the few Junit tests we have to make sure the code passes that test. Anything which finds problems earlier is a good thing in my mind. Recently we haven't been putting much code into the main product and have been working on smaller projects but before that there have been times where someone has put in code which compiled on their machine but without the special files they had on their machine wouldn't compile for anyone else.
The reason why I have become interesting in this was because I was reading this massive article on Continous Integration, I say article it's more like the size of a book
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
Anyway he puts forward a very strong argument why people should a continuous build and the first step towards that is getting CVS used here.
I tried (all to briefly) before to look at setting up CVS but I gave up because I had to finish some work and I couldn't find any documentation to tell me how to easily install the thing.
I also want to move to CVS is because you can easily integrate it with Eclipse.
I have been thinking recently that it's about time I tried looking at it again. The main driving force behind my ambition to change to CVS is so I can create an automated build. The build at the moment has improved a lots and it's almost automatic except everyone runs it in their own development environment and it points to their own code. It also doesn't manually check out the code from repository. These has meant we are not always working with the latest code and we also tend to have our own files mixed in with the latest files which can often hide dependencies, which we don't find out about until someone else tries to build the code.
If we can get CVS in we can then setup an automatic build of the latest code which if nothing else should see if the code compiles and then I can setup Ant to run the few Junit tests we have to make sure the code passes that test. Anything which finds problems earlier is a good thing in my mind. Recently we haven't been putting much code into the main product and have been working on smaller projects but before that there have been times where someone has put in code which compiled on their machine but without the special files they had on their machine wouldn't compile for anyone else.
The reason why I have become interesting in this was because I was reading this massive article on Continous Integration, I say article it's more like the size of a book
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
Anyway he puts forward a very strong argument why people should a continuous build and the first step towards that is getting CVS used here.
posted by The Hosk at
12:30 am
5 Comments:
CVS is on its last legs. Go for subversion instead. You won't regret it.
By
Anonymous, at Thu Sept 07, 02:08:00 am 2006
I agree, Subversion is much better.
By
Matt Raible, at Thu Sept 07, 03:54:00 am 2006
Definitely Subversion. For automatic build, we use Ant + CruiseControl. Works very well.
By
Someone Else, at Thu Sept 07, 05:44:00 am 2006
Thanks for the advice people, I am going to try subversion and hopefully in a few months I will be praising those individuals who left comments telling me to do so.
By
The Hosk, at Thu Sept 07, 08:48:00 am 2006
Go with Subversion. I set up a server a few months ago, and migrated everything from our CVS repository. If you have time, setup Apache to access the SVN repository, it seems to work a lot better in the long run and you get Web access to your files for free.
Also, Tortoise SVN, makes working with files under version control a breeze.
By
Anonymous, at Thu Sept 07, 09:41:00 am 2006
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