Alternative to VSS for a one man show (army of one?)

Question

I\'ve been programming for 10+ years now for the same employer and only source code control we\'ve ever used is VSS. (Sorry - That\'s what they had when I started). There\'s

Answer 1

For what it's worth, Perforce is a potential option if you truly stick to 1 or 2 users. Current perforce docs says you have have 2 users and 5 clients without having to start purchasing licenses.

You might have reasons to switch to perforce depending on your workflow and if you have need of branching the way perforce does it. Not being overly familar with some the other products mentioned here, I can't tell you how perforce compares in the feature department for things like branching, etc.

It is speedy, and it's been rock solid for us (300+ developers on a 10+ year old codebase). We store several T of info and it's been quite responsive. With a small number of users, I doubt that you'd experience many performance troubles assuming you had good hardware for your server.

Having used VSS before, I believe that you can get so many benefits out of a better SCM system that switching should be considered regardless of whether you have corruption or not. Branching alone might be worth it for you. A true client/server model, better interfaces (programmatically and command line) are a couple of other things that could really help just improve your workflow and help somewhat with productivity.

In summary, my view of Perforce is:

• It's fast and quite reliable
• Plenty of cross platform client tools (windows, unix, mac, etc)
• it's free for 2 users and 5 clients
• Integrates into developer studio (and other tools)
• Has a powerful branching system (that might or might not be right for you).
• Has several scriptable interfaces (python, perl, ruby, C++)

Certainly YMMV -- I only offer this alternative up as something that might be worthwhile looking into.