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by philbarr 1013 days ago
"Subversion was slow and clunky"

Lucky you, you never used clearcase or Visual SourceSafe!

5 comments

As opposed to git, which is fast and clunky
I used Visual SourceSafe before git. What a nightmare
SourceSafe was nice with its built in tools integration when everyone else at the time was non existent. It was really meant for a 2-5 person team. Anything bigger and the thing would die on its own database updates. But if you are still using that thing today you should move away from it. It is terrible for usage today. I got to the point I was doing backups every 6 hours and keeping rotating backups on hand for when it decided to corrupt itself. Then I as subjected to clearcase and sourcesafe was amazing compared to the complexity that thing brought. I knew it was bad when they had to send out a consultant just to show us how to get it installed correctly and make branches.
ClearCase?! An enormous pile of unnecessary complexity. Where I worked they hired a fulltime person just to manage it!

I remember fondly, there was no way to back out a commit. The hired consultant told me "Just check out the previous version and check it back in over the bad change!"

So now our test group would have two(!) changes to test, instead of zero. Brilliant.

I also remember ClearCase had five (5!) views of the same database. Commands worked on one of the five view, and god help you if you got confused.

SourceSafe apparently had integration with the VBA editor in Office 2000 [1]. I've never used it, but it seems like it would have been handy when I had to work in VBA.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/d...

And perforce. +1 for clearcase though - even perforce was a breath of fresh air compared to it.
Yep, subversion was a dream compared to VSS, branches that actually worked, what a concept.
CMSynergy. I shudder thinking about it.