I'm getting married! - More Details

Who Changed Which Line?

Thursday, December 28, 2006 11:21 AM

I've been researching source control products lately, dreaming about a day when I might be able to move away from SourceSafe. You see, due to limited branching support, I'm stuck making changes in one branch, and manually merging them to the main trunk. I spend about half my time doing this it seems. Bleh. Anyway, that's a discussion for another day...

The point is, in reading about Subversion, I stumbled across a feature which I've ALWAYS wanted to have: BLAME.

Basically, you can view the current version of any file, and see not only which lines have changed, but who changed them!

Using TortoiseSVN, you get a nice visual of who is responsible for each line...

Tortoise Blame

VERY  handy for when you're looking at a line and wondering "who the hell wrote this?!?!?". In SourceSafe, this requires combing back through the history of the file, which is combersome at best.

Just another reason to switch away from SourceSafe.

For what it's worth, Vault from SourceGear also has the Blame feature, and is also a fine replacement for SourceSafe. In fact, that's what I've been using at home for source control for some time now, as the single-user version is free.

I'm increasingly intrigued by SVN though, and over the next few weeks I'm planning to get it setup and see what it's all about.

Comments

Ian
Dusty,

I've been using subversion for close to a year now, and have to say that, hands-down, it's the best way to go for source control. I haven't honestly used SourceSafe, but I have used CVS and a few others, none of which have been as easy and nearly as useful as subversion. Despite the fact that its intended for linux machines, installing it on windows is a piece of cake, and there are a great many tools that work with subversion (tortoise obviously, but the trac project is about as bad-ass a companion as one could hope for!)

That's my humble opinion... Besides, all the cool kids are using it!


Post a comment

   
 
  
  

    

All content © Dusty Davidson