Hi Figured I'd chime in with my 2 cents worth. I've not used AlienBrain so I can't comment on that. I have used VSS, StarTeam, CVS and another home rolled source control system. By far the absolute best system I've ever used is StarTeam (from Borland). It had the best feature set in terms of checking out/checking in, locking and unlocking files, keeping you appraised of who had what file checked out, when files were newer, what files you had on your machine that were modified etc..
When I was forced to convert to StarTeam from VSS, I was a bit pessimistic but it didn't take long to see that StarTeam had a much more "sensible" UI (although I'm not a fan of their latest icons) and actually made sense to more people. We used it for almost all our assets: fla, swf, as, psd, etc.. as well as documents (Word, Excel, PP, Project etc) and we had artists, project managers, senior managers, programmers, qa etc.. all using it and all understanding it. Now I will be upfront and state clearly that I don't neccessarily believe that StarTeam has done a lot on the to minimize binary file growth other then to apply compression to the file. What I mean by that is if you were to say take a text file in CVS and look at how it stores it. It does so by saving all the changes into a single text file and uses a markup and indexing system to track what the "latest version" should be and who made all the individual changes up to that point. Something that can be easily done in text files is not something that can be so easily done with a binary file. As Jester points out, all version control systems to date cannot tell you what changed between saves of an fla or for that matter a swf. This means when you go to check a file in to a version control system, a binary file is often saved as a copy, the more check-ins the more copies of the file. My understanding is the Subversion was supposed to be doing something to minimize this affect on binary files. That they had or were working on some kind of change system like that used by CVS for text files although I haven't done enough research to prove that statement. If one is not careful, you can rapidly fill a version control system with small binary files (those smaller then the "cluster size" (is that the correct term?) of a hard drive - ie. 4kb for Windows NT) because they take up more HD room then the file size. So when looking for a version control system you want to study how they save files, especially binary files, and make sure that they do something to minimize the affect. Some systems might take all the changes for a given file and put them into a single compressed archive thereby minimizing growth to some extent. >From my experience, no matter what version control system you use, you >absolutely need a solid backup system for your version control system. And you >need to test it frequently enough to ensure it is successfully backing up. I >have seen first hand a group who used a version control system, failed to >backup the database and vault correctly and eventually the db failed. While >all the files were still in the vault there was no way to retrieve them >because all the references were stored in the now defunct database. If you >grow to rely on a version control system to be the repository for all files, >you are dealing with a single point of failure and thus you need to make sure >that you have armour plated backup/restore system. Just before I left my previous employer, we began to switch from StarTeam to CVS, because CVS was cheaper (aka free) and therefore "so much better". While there are a number of GUI interfaces to CVS we never found one that really satisfied our needs like StarTeam did. We also found CVS to be rather wanting in terms of features and we had a lot of issues with synchronization. We tried the SmartCVS and WinCVS interfaces as well as Tortoise interface. Each interface had some feature that worked better then others but none worked quite that way we wanted it to work and we lost countless hours of screwing around and trying to work around its limitations. A good point to take away from that experience would be to look beyond the price tag. While CVS is a good repository system for some people it might not work that well for others. I haven't used Subversion to see if it is any better. Good version control systems are well worth their weight in gold. Glancing at the price tag of AlienBrain it is rather expensive, as is StarTeam (although I think StarTeam is slightly cheaper) and I believe VSS is also fairly pricey. There are two things to look at: cost of the server software and cost of individual client licenses. I would advise that you sit down and calculate how many man hours it would take to pay for a client license of one (or all) of the better source control systems. Take those numbers and then sit down and begin to evaluate which system works for you. If you start to see major quirks with one of the freebies and you find yourself spending time working around it, keep track of the time. You might find that fiscally while the g ood system cost is high for initial implementation, you save huge amounts long term. By the way, CVS works best with Eclipse as someone else already pointed out. I would also point out that there is a StarTeam integration for Eclipse as well so it behaves much like CVS does inside of Eclipse - although I have to admit the StarTeam integration with Eclipse still has a long way to go in terms of functionality. For merging files, text files that is. StarTeam has a built in merge tool as does SmartCVS (and SmartSVN) but if you want a decent tool for Windows that works well I would recommend taking a look at Beyond Compare (http://www.scootersoftware.com). Its cheap, works well. I use it almost every day to synchronize folders and files. Doesn't merge binary files but then again I'm not sure of any tool that really will merge binary files. Well that was my long winded 2cents worth. Sincerely Mark R. 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