Ask HN: source control for windows?

2 points by hvasishth 15y ago ↗ HN

Any recommendations on source control system for an all windows environment? I looked at git for windows but it sounds like it is not as well supported due to lack of resources and I would really prefer to get a system I can trust and not have to worry about.

[Edit] I am looking primarily for personal work.

5 comments

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tomh- 15y ago ↗

Git, Mercurial, Subversion...they all work on windows, although I would leave the hosting to a good old *nix machine.

vitovito 15y ago ↗

Short answer: I use Fossil on Windows for source control for multiple projects ranging from a handful of files to hundreds of megabytes of sources: http://www.fossil-scm.org/

Long answer: It depends on what you're going to do with it. Are you looking for yourself, for personal work? Are you looking for multiple team members? Distributed? Centralized with no administrator? Centralized with an IT and administration team? Does the server have to be Windows? Does it have to support other OSes later? Does it have to integrate with a particular IDE on Windows? What about a hosted solution?

Companies with Windows development environments which I've worked at have used Subversion (and Trac) and Perforce, and I've heard of people using Microsoft SourceSafe (apparently deprecated in favor of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management) and SourceGear Vault. Bazaar (bzr) and Mercurial (hg) also should have decent Windows support.

rick888 15y ago ↗

For all my personal stuff, I use:

http://www.visualsvn.com/ for the server (there is a free version).

plus http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ for the client.

It works very well for all of my personal project and doesn't really require too much setup. I also have openSSH installed to make it a little more secure.

This also comes in handy because I can tunnel through it when I'm on an open wireless connection and all my web traffic is encrypted (even DNS requests).

jaddison 15y ago ↗

I use git on Windows without issue, but I push repos to Linux servers/github because I wouldn't trust any single platform to safely store my code and that of my clients. This is now my source control of choice.

As an aside, I've used Subversion (SVN) extensively on Windows with success as well. And Mercurial a bit too.

In all honesty, use a system that's intended to work on multiple platforms and trusted by thousands of others. You have plenty of choices, and most of the good ones will work well on Windows too, even if they were written with *nix/bsd systems in mind at first.

(go with git!) ;)

patio11 15y ago ↗

I use, and swear by, TortoiseSVN.