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> Bill Swallow wrote:
> > Subversion.
>
> Long ago I used Clearcase, and was not happy.
>
> Recently I used Subversion (and its friend the tortoise). Bill is correct.
>
> Subversion seems to have the right level of frills, and if one is just a
> teensy bit careful it does not get in the way of Getting Things Done.
> IIRC it lacks fancy locking schemes.
>
> Fancy locking schemes require even fancier unlocking tricks for getting
> your hands onto the file that Joe Southseas left locked when he took off
> for his Island Vacation.
My current employer has instances of at least six different content/configuration/document management systems. In some cases the parent corporation acquired another CMS system when it acquired a smaller company (like the one where I work). In other cases, it appears that it's just because different program managers have their own preferences and apparently have enough budget and political influence with IT to get their preference implemented.
The two systems I use most frequently are Subversion and eRoom (a web-interface collaboration tool built on top of a Documentum docbase), each of which is used by one of the development teams I currently work with. Both work well for tech docs, although they are very different in how you interact with them as far as checking out and locking files. I'd be hard pressed to choose one over the other.
But one thing to make note of with Subversion is that there are a lot of different client apps that can be used with a given Subversion repository. Many Subversion implementations use TortoiseSVN as the preferred client since it comes from the same open source community as Subversion itself. But most of the team I work with uses SyncroSVN, which I find I like a lot better than Tortoise although it did take me a while to get used to some of the terminology they use in their UI.
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