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Simple, Remote, Source Control - Suggestion?

Started by DCM Aug 24, 2009 at 6:52 PM 2 replies 950+ views
Original Post
DCM
DCM
I'm looking for a very simple and easy to maintain remote source control solution for my current project as I'm just starting to branch out of my solo state and hiring freelance artists and potentially other friends from college, etc. spread across the country to help work on various engines, modules or scripts. I've used CVS and Alienbrain in the past, 3-5 years ago now, however I was never the admin for it - was simply a user so I didnt have anything to do with setting it up so this is a new endevour for me. With cost in mind I was looking up CVS recently to see if I could set it up, maybe use a FTP server i already had for back-ups to get it going remotely and found its been widely replaced by Subversion/SVN. Further looking into the situation, it seems you cannot use a FTP server as your repository, which I had originally anticipated. This left me searching for solutions and found myself wasting time trolling googling more-or-less aimlessly. My key search criteria: 1.) Low cost, being a sole proprietorship business in my spare time I dont have extensive monthly funds - but I do have some to spend if an appropriate solution is found for my other issues though. 2.) Expandability, currently there is only myself, a designer and two artists - but will hopefully have a larger team to manage and would like something that will be able to handle moderate growth. 3.) Simple set-up and use, rather spend my time developing than playing server admin. It is also important that set-up is simple for others to set-up as I might not always be able to physically access a users machine, and tech levels will vary between users depending on their function. 4.) User access control, would prefer to limit access to various directories of the repository on a user-to-user basis. If i'm hiring freelance work, most likely low cost, I don't necessarily want to have all users to have access to any proprietary engines or other source code, assets or otherwise but would like a central location for data to flow as opposed to me having to manage emailed deliverables and commiting to the repository manually. 5.) Capability to get daily updates from the repository. Not as critical at the moment being the only engineer, but should I recruit others this would become more important so everyone is always working to the most current build, information or data. I know there are start up batch scripts you can run to do this, or at least I know you could in CVS but I've never written one myself and if a service provided an easy interface it would be ideal. -------------------------- Through my initial search I stumbled upon a service called CVSDude.com that seemed pretty extensive in terms of service like ease of set-up and use as well as providing the hosting service which is important to me, tried to read some reviews but still unsure on the quality, ease of use, etc. Was wondering if anyone has any other suggestions for services that will accomplish what I need, or first hand experience with CVSDude that can confirm its capabilities and quality. Thanks!
rogma
rogma
If you do not mind using subversion you may find the following links interesting :

http://www.origo.ethz.ch/ open/closed source subversion

for open source code, the classics :
http://sourceforge.net/
http://developer.berlios.de/

I think they all offer user account, ftp, plus basic project management

CVS is really deprecated in my opinion, and you will probably have a very quick migration towards subversion (in very short it removes the burden of doing a cvs tag)

Regards
BeanDog
BeanDog
CVS, Subversion, and (I've heard) Git all handle large binary files pretty poorly. If your purpose here is to make it easy to exchange large art assets with your newly-acquired artists, you might consider a solution that deals with that case well. I've heard an incredible number of great things about Perforce for dealing with large binary files.

FWIW, I have used Subversion for everything until just recently. I'm now having a serious love affair with Git. I'm convinced that Git is a replacement for Subversion that is better in every way, and is currently my source control of choice (although other tools like Perforce still fill niches I'm not part of).
DCM
DCM
Just to clarify, incase it sent the wrong message - the previously mentioned CVSDude.com is a subversion based hosting company, i guess they used to do CVS but now only offer it for backwards compatability but never updated their name. Subversion was my target for a source control solution as it seems to be the economy-class option of choice - the how and who to impliment it with is the outstanding question.

While managing artist assets is one aspect, it certainly wont be the only and in terms of art assets it is a management/convienence thing. The more pressing issue and need is to get my project on a remote source control server so I can start working with other designers and engineers on a common build with back-up capabilities, etc.

Not sure what large assets would be, but I wouldnt expect more than a few megs for things like textures and models. i've only used source control on the engineering side writing code so never had problems with my file sizes. I'll check out Preforce though, but would prefer the simplicity of a single solution and central repository if possible.

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