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Does anyone use Accurev for Source Control Management? We are switching (eventually) from StarTeam to Accurev.
My initial impression is that the GUI tool is severely lacking, however the underlying engine, and the branches as streams concept is incredible.
The biggest difficulty we are facing is assessing our own DIY tools that interfaced with starteam, and either replacing them with DIY new tools, or finding and purchasing appropriate replacements.
Additionally, is anyone using the AccuWork component for Issue management? Starteam had a very nice change request system, and AccuWork does not come close to matching it. We are evaluating either using Accuwork, or buying a 3rd party package such as JIRA.
Opinions?
Sweet mother of god is Accurev awful. 300k lines of code? Try it with millions, with hundreds of developers working on scores of projects.
Continuous integration? Sure, that's something that developers can approximate by doing regular merges in, say, perforce, git, mercurial, or any of the countless other tools that actually gets the work done, but it becomes the choice of the developer as to how to proceed. For architects, leads, build engineers, or anyone who actually uses source control to slice and dice, Accurev is horrific.
I went to an "Advanced Accurev topics" talk, and the first tidbit was a large shell command for clearing out Accurev's client-side caching/sync mechanism to correct for when Accurev updates silently fail to pull down files that should be updated.
A Timestamp Optimization checkbox? Deep overlaps? Modal dialogs with only one background process? (That would be okay if those processes were anything other than glacial.) Cascading graphs of selectively configured streams put in place just to be able to pull off components and cross-merging? Updates aren't actually atomic without time-locking?! (honest answer: update again)
Every time I try and do anything serious in Accurev, I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette at a table with HAL9000, Skynet, and a Speak & Spell. On the line? Four more hours of my life.
Why am I here, griping about Accurev? Because my other machine has taken a full four hours to try to update 10MB of files over VPN. Why? Because some other change has come up stranded and requires some sort of catastrophic resync scan for elements. The worst part? All of these files were on a workspace on the same computer. We're talking about several hours just to get a recently updated workspace to the point where I can put the right notches in the stream history.
One word Accurev review: Avoid
Honestly, I feel like I need to double check to see if I'm using the same tool as these folks that seem to like Accurev. I used Subversion in my previous job and liked it a lot. We never had any issues with it to speak of, and of course the price is right. My biggest problem with Accurev is that it seems they felt the need to be different for different's sake. It uses a completely different vocabulary to express versioning concepts, that even after using it for almost 6 months, feels very foreign to me. It has no fewer than 8 or 9 states any given file can be in, compared to about around 1/2 as many for Subversion. The GUI is crappy and slow, and the IDE integration plugins are sub-par. I had assumed that at some point I would "get" Accurev and see why it's so much better, but that has yet to happen. My advice is to stay away.
I have used AccuRev for nine months and I anxiously await the day I use it no more. My one line review is:
It's like source control written by developers who have read about it in a
book, but have never actually used it before.
Basic concepts are missing or extremely complicated. Example, I've just lost 8 hours work because there's no good way to "revert" a change once it's in a stream. You can "purge" that transaction - but thats it its gone, you can't then cherry pick the changes you really wanted.
The GUI is slow, bloated and inconsistent. Warnings are cryptic eg "error merging element id 1234556". Every single dialog box is modal. As one poster said, there are 9 states a file can be in - but what's more, you must manually click through a list box of 9 options to see the setting for each file.
The streams model sounds like a good idea, but the default behavior of "inheriting" changes from a parent stream is actually incredibly bad in practice. Just say the word "Deep Overlap" to anyone who has really used AccuRev and watch them shudder, turn pale, and/or faint. Making the streams is very easy, but actually merging them with any meaningful differences is arcane and non-deterministic.
No one has mentioned this, but the whole system of "include/exclude" rules to manage file and directory filters is completely broken. This system lives outside the transaction system so there's no way to revert, track history or reproduce changes to a live source stream - for example when Johnny Intern decides the "core" library isn't useful to the entire development team.
The only reason I can account for Accurev's popularity is that it is optimized for the "Demo to Management" case. We're using AccuRev for serious software development - dozens of projects and many more developers. The streams and the GUI look great but after a few weeks use varnish comes off revealing a old, busted, mechanical-turk like system.
Stay far away from Accurev - use Git or Mercurial if you want something modern and free, or Perforce if you want something rock solid, well-supported but expensive.
EDIT:
As a postscript here's one of the many examples of the lack of care and general shoddiness in the UI:
The default difference viewer has its numbering "off by one" - for example if you have 2 diffs in a file - the viewer shows diff "0 of 1" and diff "1 of 1". I mean, really, would you feel comfortable trusting your code to a system that exhibits such a stupid and easily fixable bug.
I worked on (and administrated) AccuRev for more than a year lately, and most of my impressions are very good.
We evaluated it alongside with "Plastic SCM", SVN and "ClearCase-UCM" (that we already owned and used), and decided to dump ClearCase and SVN (both were used in two different groups) and to purchase AccuRev.
First, the stream architecture is much more solid, easy and safe SCM method than the old branching architecture that all the other tools are tied to (yes even ClearCase's "streams" are eventually a wrapper of branches). There's a lot of articles about the differences in their site, you can search and read about it to make it understandable. (Try this link, and this one too)
The timesafe architecture - you can't delete anything from the depots (=repositories) database. I saw tools that this operation is possible with the proper admin permissions. In AccuRev you will use internal commands in order to change or fix a mistake you made, which in turn will be recorded as a new transaction also. Very smart very safe.
integrations! AccuRev integrates with so many tools (to give you ALM bundle) - bug tracking tools (like JIRA, ClearQuest), IDEs, testing tools (quality center), and if you can't find one you can write your own (they provide Java/Perl/XML/CLI SDKs)
Change Package, I don't know about you, but I can't stand SCM tools that doesn't supply change management (did anyone said SVN?), like ClearCase "activities", and AccuRev's "issues". It's a must for my opinion, and one of my CM "best practice". And they can be integrated with your bug tracking tool too, so your users can work on real tasks like features and defects.
the support is just amazing. As a former client of IBM (because of Rational ClearCase is now part of IBM), the shift to AccuRev was simply awesome. During the evaluation they gave numerous on-line support to understand how we want the tool to act for us, so we tweaked it together even before we payed a cent. And they kept that degree of responsiveness after that evaluation period too; We had some problem during an upgrade from 4.5.4 to 4.6, in just a couple of hours (while the upgrade is still in process) the support guy contacted me back, suggested a few tips, connected to my desktop and finally fixed the problem before any other company's support would even started to try to figure who you are. Of course that if you choose open source tool than you're on your own!
Also the tool comes with help system, which can be even too verbose sometimes. And don't forget the forums (especially on cmcrossroads) that are very good in supplying rapid answers too.
And there's so many more....
Of course there are also drawbacks (which software is perfect?) - I would like, for example, to see the file(s) <-> issue(s) association during check-in too, like in ClearCase, not just in "promotion" like it is today - but IMHO they are really minor.
So, as you can understand, if you read it all, I'm a big fan of AccuRev, and I'm highly recommending it. IMHO, it is today one of the best SCM tools you got the chance to work on; modern, wise, easy and strong.
My current client uses Accurev for SCM and after a few projects using a DVCS like Git or Mercurial, I can honestly say that using Accurev is about as enjoyable as closing your face in a car door.
The GUI for Mac and Linux is god awful slow. You can forget using the refactoring support in your IntelliJ or NetBeans IDE, if you use Accurev...that is unless you are going to write your own plugin.
Oh yea...let's not forget about this little chestnut ==> evil twin.
On a positive note, it could be worse...it could be Clearcase.
Accurev sucks! It's overcomplicated for the price of productivity of the team.
I've worked with several SCMs and the idea of accurev is great but not practical. It's Merge Hell with a hierarchy that looks good in the UI but is pain to deal with when it comes to real life.
Specially when you refactor your code (something that some people actually do everyonce in a while) and you get in a mess when a defunct file is not promote all the way up. Or even worse if somebody else overrides a defunct file and creates a new file with the same name....etc
The UI is incredible terrible. Which honestly doesn't matter how good you think the backend is. You will still use the UI (I use the VS plugin which is half decent except it freezes the IDE sometimes, nice huh!).
If you live in the 80's and are planing to use the command line for you day to day use, then i guess you can avoid the UI. If you have an integration build server then of course you have no choice but to use the command line (No native tasks for MSbuild/ANT/NANT that i know of). I just heard that they are doing some work with http://www.electric-cloud.com/. Don't know anything about it still.
Accurev is new therefore there has little resources available online as apposed to svn which you would find tons of integration work that was done by hundreds (with jira for example).
If you are a manager. Accurev will make you feel good looking at the streams, because it does look pretty as long as you dont have to deal with it..
If you are a developer, (a junior developer will not care much, he/she will do whatever you ask them to do)
If you are an architect, refactors a lot, re-addresses architecural descisions...etc you will find accurev as your worste enemy, moving stuff around is pain. Very anti-agile if you ask me. It's not fluid..
If you are a build engineer, you will find it PAIN to get all the developers into a procedure, which you will have to do if you use accurev (ex. promote their code to the agreed upon stream in preperation for a release)....
CRM is supposed to make things easier... I dont see Accurev at this point doing that.. It's still not mature enough, If you want to be a pioneer and strugle in the hope for things to get better..go for it..
Otherwise, don't re-invent the wheel and go with something more established with much more case studies and applications. Because to be practical, what accurev claims to offer that differs is not worth it when you deal with it's pains on a daily basis...
We've been using AccuRev for a few years now. It's a serious improvement over our last tool (Razor) and while I'd recommend it for others- it does have a few drawbacks.
Benefits:
The stream based interface is quite intuitive. I make snapshots every second week and have a number of ongoing development streams branching off the snapshot.
Moving changes between stream is really easy, just select the change, send it to the "change palette" and select the destination stream. It guides you through all the files that need to be merged.
The command-line utilities are great. We've managed to script most of our release generation around it.
Integrations for Visual Studio, Bugzilla, etc...
Drawbacks:
As monjardin pointed out, the client GUI can be slow. I use the windows version for all my history/stream searching since it's much faster than the X11 one. Of course, the GUI's written in Java so performance obviously wasn't their first concern.
It's starting to get slow for really large databases (I'm talking over 300,000 LOC), although they've apparently addressed it in today's release of 4.7.
We opted to go with the cheaper license and not get the change packages feature (I can't see them working that well anyways, as the entire idea of promoting individual changes flies in the face of continuous integration). So far it hasn't hurt us.
Overall, for the price you pay it's a nice tool. We evaluated ClearCase, MKS, Spectrum and Subversion during our trial period. Subversion may have been a good choice, but it was still pretty green when we were evaluating. I've never heard of Plastic before, but I regret not evaluating Perforce.
Also, I understand that the engineers over at Trolltech (makers of Qt) have recently switched to git. I'd be interested in checking that out as well.
We use AccuRev for 4 years already. I hate it very much, mostly because of its horrible GUI. Several years ago AccuRev sent a survey for their clients to fill and at the end of the survey there was a field with suggestions. I started collecting things which annoy me the most, and below you'll find what I have now. Unfortunately, it's full of AccuRev terminology, but I think you'll get the idea anyway.
Accurev GUI possible improvements
Working with history
When examining history, a developer most often wants to see diff to previous transaction/version. This should be as accessible as a double click. For example double-clicking on file in transaction log could open diff to previous version. Double-clicking on a file in Default Group filter could open diff to backed, double-clicking on a file in Modified search could open diff to most recent. That would save tons of time.
Common experience is that developers rarely open files for editing from within AccuRev. Rather they very often diff files, then revert or promote changes. So double click should not open files for editing, it should diff them instead. This may be an option in preferences, so different people may decide whether they want double click to diff files or open files.
It should be possible to select two transactions in stream or workspace history and perform a file diff between them.
Overlaps merging
Merging overlaps in a stream requires performing "Deep Overlap" search in a workspace that takes much more time than to search overlaps in specific stream. Then it is needed to sort overlaps by overlap stream and merge only those from specific stream. There should be more convenient way to perform merging overlaps in stream. For example ability to limit deep overlap search by specific stream and do not show overlaps in parent streams. Limiting Deep Overlap search by timelocked stream is not very useful if you are several streams under this timelocked stream or there is no timelock on parents at all.
Now there is a simplified way that involves creating change palettes, but it is still not convenient. Merge menu item should be available at stream level if there is a workspace under that stream that may be used for overlaps merge.
Annotate tool
Annotate tool is very awkward:
using slider at the top to browse different version resets position in the file that is VERY annoying for large files;
should be able to open history at the specific transaction directly from annotate tool. Now developer needs to remember transaction# and search for it in stream history (also need to search for the stream where transaction was made).
Stream Favorites
Context menu item "Add to stream filter" was removed when new stream favorites were introduced. It should be possible to right click on stream and add it to one of the stream favorites (2nd level context menu, or dialog may pop up). Now it is very annoying to edit stream favorites, particularly when you need to have 2 similar sets of streams.
Stream browser
It should be easy to copy stream name to clipboard. Now you need to open "Change stream" dialog for that. Ctrl+C in stream browser could copy the name of selected stream to clipboard.
There is no way to copy stream name from stream view. Right click on tab could copy stream name in clipboard, or show context menu with "copy stream name to clipboard" item in it.
Diff and merge tool
Shows only the first different character in line, not the whole line difference, does not highlight syntax. Luckily, diff tool may be easily switched to external tool, so this is minor.
Other suggestions
Option in preferences to enable Multiple columns sort mode by default.
It would be nice to save not only the latest keep/promote log, but at least 5-10 older ones.
File extension column in stream or workspace view with ability to sort on it would be great.
Reordering tabs would be nice.
Very small font in keep/promote/lock message under Windows, it's unreadable. Increase the font size or allow user to change it.
Implement more convenient way to locally ignore files, environment variable is not very useful (user may want to ignore different sets of files in different streams/depots).
For the last 3 years AccuRev added 3 things from this list (I removed them as they are already implemented):
Hardcoded (can't be customized) keyboard shortcuts for most actions
Made it possible to call diff for several files from transaction at once (before that one should have to right click on every file and call "Diff to previous version" from context menu.
Added search for text to Annotate tool. But because of the position reset when you try to switch to different version (see above) the Annotate tool is still unusable.
Besides GUI there are fundamental flaws in AccuRev in the whole:
Difficult to update backwards
You can't easily update backwards. There is accurev update -t <transaction-number> command, but if you updated to transaction 100, you can't update to transaction 95 using accurev update -t 95. In order to do that you need to set up time lock on your backed stream (which will introduce transaction in AccuRev) and update your workspace.
Deep Overlaps
When you update you may happen to have invalid state of sources without any notice. This is because Overlaps feature. Overlap is basically a conflict (when file is changed by both you and them). If you have overlap in your workspace, you'll need to merge it before you are allowed to update. But if you have overlap in the stream, under which you have your workspace, you won't have any notice about that, but overlapped file won't be updated in your workspace. Consider the following stream structure
[Depot Root] <- [Team stream] <- [Your stream] <- [Your workspace]
Let's say you changed foo.cpp and promoted it to [Your stream]. After that someone from your team changed both foo.h and foo.cpp, let's say added method to the class Foo, and promoted the files to [Team stream]. After you update your workspace, you'll get new version of foo.h (because you didn't change it), but you won't get foo.cpp because it's overlapped in [Your stream]. So, your update will go clean, but linker will complain about unresolved symbol Foo::NewMethod if you try to build after that.
I've been a long time Accurev user, and have recently moved to a job where I'm using Perforce. I gotta tell you, I wish I had Accurev back. I do agree - the UI is slow and has problems.
However there are some truly AWESOME visualization tools in there. I can't believe that anyone would look at the version history browser and not fall in love! The stream browser is a great simple tool to understand what is going on in your development organization.
Also, dirt simple to administer. Accurev is actually one of my favourite tools.
One of the best days I've ever had at my current job is they day we ditched Accurev and moved to Subversion. Accurev uses overly complicated concepts. Like one of the commenters above, after working with it for years, I still didn't understand the different states that artifacts could be in. It seems that Accurev's greatest asset is its whitepapers and stream visualization, both of which are v appealing to management but does nothing for developers. I use Subversion, Mercurial and Git for various projects and would recommend these tools over any other.
Accurev is anti-agile tool:
Main idea of Accurev is to use different streams for different teams, so, changes made by team1 won't affect team2.Sounds good, but in a real world we all know that at the end we have to merge the code from both teams and believe me it's nightmare in Accurev. The more changes both teams will do in their streams, the more time everybody will spend on merging at the end. It's the same if every team will do their development in the separate branch using SVN and trying to merge everything after 1 month of development....Basically Accurev creates late merge price and you are going to pay this price for ever if you will choose Accurev for more than 1 team.
In order to fix problem created by point 1 people decide to refuse from cross functional teams in favor of functional. They even provide argument to support this idea, like "knowledge expertise" principle. In other words when you don't have cross functional teams (and Agile as well) it's easier to have experts for particular part of the system, so they will perform code reviews better and act as "information/design/implementation experts". We all know that information expert is an anti-pattern not only in Agile, since it's better to spread the expertise in order to avoid knowledge bottlenecks in development.
Put me in the anti-Accurev camp. We moved to it recently, and it's been horrible. We have a number of quite large projects, and Accurev seems to be almost unusable for the quantity of files we have. Over a VPN, forget it. It takes forever to update, the cross-stream management doesn't work in any intuitive way, the UI is complex and slow.
Additionally, support for it in a number of tools we use is either non-existent or poorly implemented.
Add the various bugs that keep popping up, and I'd say we wasted a great deal of money for something that is done much better by open-source software, such as Subversion. We still use CVS for some projects, and even it is so much better for normal operations and workflow that I'd pick it over Accurev.
Another big thumbs down for Accurev. Every simple operation seems to become so horribly complex - cryptic error messages send you scattering to manual, only finding theoretical explanations about concepts that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
UI is so slow and unresponsive it makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
Stay away.
Accurev has some great concepts; but suffers from:
1) many many inconsistencies in the command-line interface.
2) many bugs and nuisances in the application/interface. E.g. their time-safe property is not actually time-safe at all because of several bugs that affect snapshots and pass-through streams.
3) major bugs in critically important features... As above; time-safe bugs; bugs in merging by issues.
3) they are a year behind where they should be, because they wasted a whole year on trying to move their backend to a database - this will be version 5 which may never see the light of day.
4) The marketing is excellent; but the product does not live up to the marketing hype
5) every release has had major critical bugs that has required them to release immediate hotfixes. This has been a major disruption for us. And these aren't minor bugs.
6) doesn't scale well... takes up a huge amount of disk space and gets slower over time
Having said all that; it's still a good product; but if I were to do it all again I'd consider git instead.
After 4 months, my very negative opinion hasn't changed at all. While Accurev has some very nice concepts, the slowness and complexity far outweigh the advantages, at least for us. Aside from the usual complaints about the GUI and the obscurity of a number of features, one of the absolutely most annoying faults is how many hoops you have to jump through just to update a workspace, made much worse by the inability to update only one directory (or directory tree).
A typical update consists of waiting a loooong time to be told you have overlaps. Of course, you aren't told what the overlaps are. So, you have to do an overlap search, wait another loooong time, resolve the overlaps, do another update, wait a looooong time, and hope it worked this time.
Some of our remote developers update as infrequently as possible because the update time over VPN is absurd. Granted, we have an enormous number of source files across a number of products, and if we reorganized everything we could probably improve performance.
However, we hired Accurev (at a significant cost) to come in and tell us how to set everything up. Still sucks. Aside from that, we really shouldn't have to reorganize the way we work with our sources to suit a source-code-control system. It's a tool, not a business model.
Lastly, we've been trying out an Accurev plugin for IntelliJ, written by Accurev. It works just as poorly as the rest, and, while Accurev has been very responsive about fixing the plugin, we aren't their QA group, nor did we sign up to be an alpha test site (yes, it's that buggy). We finally gave up and wrote our own plugin that actually works.
#Steveth
The Interface is lousy...However the streams model is very innovative.
Being able to create a stream for a new project off the trunk stream, and having 5 developers working on it, and not having any form of merge collisions when we merge that stream back into the main trunk is unheard of, yet it works well in Accurev.
At a previous employer we reviewed Accurev and Plastic SCM. At the end of the day, I was not impressed with Accurev's interface, or the so-called "streams". We went with Plastic, and nobody complained.
#Jonathan
The streams are interesting,but I don't see how any version control can magically avoid collisions when two people touch the same code in the same file. Accurev's model was intriguing, but at the end of the day, nice clean branching and merging with a drop dead easy interface made Plastic the choice for us. Plastic's timeline view (I forget the actual name), showing the branch/merge/check-in history made it very simple to review the history of the project from a bird's eye view.
Accurev is simply the worst tool I have ever used.
Subversion is very good, esp if you are migrating from cvs.
My company ha been using Accurev since early 2010, coming from StarTeam before that and CVS in the very distant past. I haven't used CVS (having been on a different team at the time) so I have no comparisons there, and I never bothered to learn StarTeam too intimately.
Since then I've also played with both the CLI and Tortoise versions of SVN, Git, and Mercurial (Hg) in my free time. I plan on giving Git a more thorough go at some point, but I found Hg to be much more intuitive and easy (at least under Windows). Anyway, like I said management saddled us with Accurev and after spending time to get fairly well acquainted with it (GUI and CLI both) as a developer... I absolutely hate it.
Someone earlier in the thread summed it up as software written by devs that had read about SCM in a book but never used it... I agree whole-heartedly but you also get the feeling that they had the same level of experience with GUIs, efficient processing, etc. (In fact, I see that Accurev has a new product called "Kando" based on Git...sounds like they've finally realized how bad their model is. But to quote a coworker "I wouldn't trust anything written by the same team at this point"... I have to wonder if it is a coincidence that there is a baby-wipe product named "Kandoo"...)
Ok, obviously I don't care for the product. If you've spent the time to read this thread, then obviously there are quite a few folks with similar views on it. But I wanted to share some of my own gripes that I've had with it over the last few years as well -- btw if it helps anyone, I think we were using v4.7 previously and have been on v5.3 (?) now for quite some time.
My biggest beef with Accurev is how horribly slow and inefficient it is. Notice I didn't use the word GUI -- I've tried both GUI and CLI-- the slow parts are on the server, so you're screwed either way. It seems like I see one of those damn modal dialog/status bars at every turn... I switch tabs -- bam!: processing, please wait. I reparent a stream -- oh wait just another minute. For "Updates" I expect it to be a little slow (although sometimes it gets annoying when it screams "Overlap" [aka a conflict] at me when I happen to have a file with IDENTICAL content to what it's pushing down). I change directories browsing to a path... processing, processing, "oh you want to go down one more sub-folder"... let me process that some more. You get the idea.
Is that my only beef? Hell no.
1) For the merge tool, I've had the "ignore white space" option checked for years, but I can only ever recall it working ONE time (for example, say we're talking about about comparing say 2 versions of a JSP where I converted spaces to tabs or trimmed some trailing white space or something). Why is this an issue? Because it becomes pure torture for every other developer that looks in the history and wants to see what REALLY changed. If they can't get implement this correctly, don't put the F***ING option there. (Note:using WinMerge as an external compare tool, with appropriate settings works fine)
2) I've had instances where checking a file into one stream and then needing to put an IDENTICAL copy of that same file into another stream (using the same issues #) causes it to throw a temper tantrum. If I use the wrong issue #, it goes in with no problem. This is probably an isolated case (and maybe due to other poor process decisions my company saddles us with) but I thought I'd mention it for completeness.
3) The history? All stored on the server. Translation: If you enjoyed waiting for it to switch tabs, create/reparent a workspace, and update then you're in for more of the same when you want to view history.
4) The way it's exclusionary rules are done is not only terrible but also pathetic. Under Windows, you actually have to create an environment variable where you can create some exclusions to files that you don't want to show up. IT DOES NOT SUPPORT REGEX. I've seen several other SCMs that offer much better approaches (I'm fond of the the ignore files used in Hg. I think there is something similar in Git too) -- not only are both regex and glob patterns supported, but defining this in a FILE is more system-friendly and much easier to edit that putting it into an Environment variable. Not only that, but it seems that the ignore filters are iffy at best. The way our projects are defined have the build folder under the project folder (which is source controlled) and trying to exclude all folders under the the build folder doesnt seem to work -- most of them still show up in my "External" filter even after setting up rules.
5) It's check-in process (a "Promote") also seems to run with the theme of slow and inefficient. We use an external ticket system (not AccuWork... our ticketing system has its flaws but after using AccuRev, I can't image that product to be much better). Anyway, when we say "Promote [this file]", first it pops up with another modal dialog (after the required waiting, while it does more stat processing), then it presents a list of ALL tickets it has pulled (there are a lot...too many to reliably find anything). Next, we must enter our ticket number from the other system, and wait some more while it takes forever to find a match (I thought it already pulled the list...geez). Finally, it will display the matches, then we pick one and tell it to promote using that ticket number. After yet some more waiting, we're finally done.
I could go on but I'll stop there.... this post is getting too long. Instead, let me sum up Accurev in my own way: After having to wait for all these slow annoying "Stat processing", etc dialogs during an issue where we were trying to quickly get a fix out, I came up with a new slogan for them: "AccuRev: when seconds count, your fix is only minutes away".
Since management won't get rid of Accurev (I know they won't go for anything without Enterprise support but I've begged for them to consider anything else: SmartGit...Kiln...Perforce...), I have been using TortoiseHg to locally version control my files (in addition to Accurev). It is a little more work. But for those saddled with Accurev, it makes life so much easier. You get: better diff management -- MUCH MUCH easier to see and review code changes after an "accurev update", the ability to view some history without waiting 10 years for the server, ability to share directly between you and another dev (assuming they also install it), ability to revert/restore your changes if you accidentally wipe something out while trying to get clear of Accurev's merge hell ("Overlapped" files), and even more if you can get the rest of your team using it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, during a conversion with our build engineers I was told that while Accurev has a Java API that you can develop for, it apparently requires purchasing some sort of additional licensing. I can't confirm this since a) I can't find pricing anywhere on Accurev's website* and b) I doubt like hell they'd tell me at work...
*Kinda weird considering I can find some sort of rough pricing for Perforce, Kiln, StarTeam and SmartGit quite easily. I usually get a sketchy feeling when some product won't list any sort of price up front, guess it shouldn't surprise me too much that Accurev falls into that category...
Well, all I can say is that I completely agree. The back-end is great but the UI sucks. The stream functionality is great because it makes merging no brainier as all changes from parent streams are automatically propagated to all children. I wrote a post about Accurev UI that explains most of the shortcomings I've come across for last 2 years.
The sort answer:
Use the latest SVN server and SmartSVN (the community edition is free) as a client.
You will not pay anything and you can get everything you need.
The gory details:
BTW the feature of imposing the change management rules during checking is trivial to write as a SVN hook. We did it in a couple of hours, in one hundred lines (or thereabout) of code - it works wonderfully and never broke. It integrates SVN with Bugzilla and imposes rules such as:
In order to commit you have to enter a message
In order to commit you must have entered a Bugzilla ID that is in a "Valid" commit state.
... and so on, you can build your own rules to your heart's content
Accurev seems to be marketware to me ... lousy GUI client ... very slow (we had to upgrade the HW to make it actually work effectively), and of course ... you have to pay for it! Ah yes, if you do use it, I hope that you do not have to replicate your server between some place in the US and some place in India :)
Perforce is more robust but it is not very easy to administer. In any case, it is a superior product in comparison to Accurev.
VSS and stuff like that should not even be considered as "version control" systems when it comes to writing professional software (typically, enterprise software) in the 21st century. That's like writing your reports on a typewriter ;-)
If you know what you are doing (with your software) then SVN will be a robust and efficient solution for you. With (at least) two robust and efficient revision control systems in existence today (SVN/GIT) there is very little room to justify working with a proprietary solution; some reasons could be "inertia": you have it, you don't care paying for it, and you didn't have any major issues -- in other words, it works for you.
I use SVN everywhere, when it didn't exist I was using CVS, and before that ... no I am not going to tell you how old I am ;-)
Hope this helped ...
Ciao.
I've been the SVN and Accurev administrator for a time. Accurev took a long time to grow on me - about six months, but I like it now for a corporate enterprise environment. Here's a few things to consider.
Pros:
Personal code history
The code changes are kept on the server when the users performs a keep. The keep is personal to the user and doesn't distribute to other users until a promote command is issued.
The code performed by a keep is kept on the server and available even if the user performs a revert operation.
In most cases, promoting the code to higher streams for distribution is fairly simple.
Administration is fairly simple
Installation works well
Performance is much improved on version 5.3 which changed the backend to a PostGres database
The CLI is rich and extensive
Cons:
A real clunky user interface
Resolving overlaps can be complex, just like conflicts in SVN
However, like any complex tool, your appreciation will increase the more you understand and know about it.
I used AccuRev at a previous job and didn't have any problems with it, but I very much prefer Subversion (even without comparing the price difference). I remember the client GUI being pretty slow too. Also, I do recall that the GUI just called their command-line utilities to interface with the repository. So, it probably won't be that hard to use those interfaces for your DIY tools.
I have used Accurev for one year. I don't like it. Here are some problems I encountered:
1. Its GUI is terrible: it's so slow that each time I switch between tabs (streams and workspaces) or perform some actions I have to wait for several seconds. It sometimes gave you a confusing error message that could not help find what's wrong.
2. It has so many concepts that you have to spend much time learning Accurev itself.
3. I once encountered such a problem: I have a version controlled file modified by our build process. Later my teammate moved that file to other location in his workspace and promoted the change. When I run "accurev update" it simply told me "some file has been moved" and everything looked normal. But actually the command stopped at the moved file and no longer updated other files. It's very confusing - your update command did not update the worksapce but you have no idea about it. The only outputed message "some file has been moved" looked just like other verbose output. It did not tell me my update failed or aborted or something else.
Before that I used SVN and ClearCase. SVN is a great tool, simple and easy to use. And I did not have so many complaints about ClearCase. Accurev is really frustrating...
I've just come across this discussion and thought I would share our experiences with AccuRev.
We have been using the Dimensions SCM from Serena for around 8 years. Two years ago we had a major problem integrating our India based Development team with our UK Dev team. It was clear that we were not going to meet our needs with the current system and hence we set about evaluating a number of options. I discuss all of this in this article How We Integrated Our Offshore Dev Team.
Our experience of using AccuRev has so far been very positive.
It is easy to setup and administer.
Users are able to get going very very quickly (especially important for the India dev team)
We've never had a problem with speed (in fact this is one of the main plus points for us)
The replication works like a dream
I do agree that the UI can be a bit clunky (especially the Unix client). I am hoping that it will be better in the latest version when we update to that next month.
All in all I would say that this was one of the best decisions and purchases we have made.
Note: I am an AccuRev user and I like it very much. I have already upvoted a few answers here, and would like to add:
I've just recently stumbled over this "review" of AccuRev in the book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley:
[Chapter 14, p 385]
Commercial Version Control Systems
(...) the only commercial VCSs that we are able to wholeheartedly recommend are:
(...)
AccuRev. Offers ClearCase-like ability to do stream-based development without the crippling administrative overhead and poor performance associated with ClearCase.
(...)
To which I might add that I never have used ClearCase, but I am the AccuRev admin around here, and it is indeed very little work to administer. (WRT performance, this question might give more insight.)
Related
We have an S/390 mainframe at my new job that’s been running COBOL applications since the late 90’s. The mainframe is getting old enough that we need to migrate to a newer system. We’re a small enough business that we can’t warrant spending the money to upgrade to new mainframe hardware and the program logic has been a constant work in progress for 30+ years, so it has a lot of functional value. I’ve been considering moving the functionality to a Linux machine and using something like OpenCOBOL to recompile as an executable binary instead of trying to rewrite it in a newer language. I haven’t messed with a mainframe enough to have any clue how or where to access this information and the gentleman that wrote all of the programs is unfortunately no longer with us. I’ve read that SSH is an option, but I’m not even sure how to get the ball rolling on that with a mainframe. I use Linux on a fairly regular basis, so I’m familiar with SSH, but from my understanding those mainframes aren’t a simple OS that you can merely connect to and navigate the file system to retrieve data like we can in modern operating systems. Can anyone give me some pointers to get a sense of direction for accessing the source code for the COBOL programs? Are there default locations that they are stored, etc.? They’re somewhat simple programs that don’t use any DB2 functionality and will hopefully compile on a different system with relatively minimal debugging and fixes. I’m certain that I’ve left out necessary information that would help getting an answer to this question, and I can provide any additional information that is needed to help you all help me. I suspect that SSH isn’t enabled by default, but maybe I’m wrong there too. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone!
Although not a programming question I'll provide some guidance I think might help you.
First, this is a business decision about where to invest.
Do we upgrade the system to a newer model and upgrade some software and acquire the skills to keep the system running? (System Programming, OS upgrade and cost of migration, newer platform (used z13 could be an economical option, storage systems to support the mainframe)
Migration of existing workloads to other platforms. (Cost to migrate code, sizing of performance needs, new technologies to replace existing access methods like VSAM or dare I say ISAM if the applications are old enough)
Status Quo ... leave things where they are and keep the lights on
In evaluating any option you have to assess the risk to the business and what would a disruption cost? IMHO, its less about a technology like SSH or COBOL on Linux but requires some serious assessment of the current state, the acceptable to be scenarios and the cost of pursuing one of those options.
My comments are not intended to instill fear but provide a framework of how do I approach analyzing a challenge of this magnitude.
There is no default location where source code is stored on z/OS (it is z/OS you're talking about, right?). Source code is usually stored in PDS data sets. The naming of those depends on the installation, i.e. the company, and whether or not any software like Endevor, ChangeMan, etc. is being used to maintain the sources.
Since this is old z/OS (OS/390) COBOL code, chances are the code is making use of OS specifics such as record level I/O, VSAM data sets, etc. These are the parts that will not work on a non-z/OS platform without major rewrite. So, you will need to look into the sources.
SSH is available on z/OS, but it needs to be configured and enabled. You need to check with your z/OS sysprog. FTP, and NFS are other options, but again, they need to be configured and enabled.
Transfering the sources is the least of your problems, I'd say.
I have to agree with the prior two answers, but have some additional suggestions. This is a business decision what to do on the system.
Finding the program to understand what it does is the first requirement. Since you know what program is running that may be the name of the source file. That you will need to find. The source file probably will be in some library manager, the first place to look is in the ISPF menu system. There will be an option for the library manager you are using if you are using one. Based on your description you may be using something called SCLM which would should up, or you might see Librarian or Panvalet. You will need to get into ISPF by connecting using a 3270 connection emulator. Once you find the file, using FTP or SFTP may be the best, or your emulator may just provide a transfer mechanism. You will need to find the related files as well, which should also be defined in the library manager.
Once you have the file, you will need to figure out what it uses as mentioned above, it will be working with some kind of data file, and that will be the biggest part to deal with.
If it is a batch program it is probably part of a schedule, and there are other programs also running that you will need to find and figure out how they fit together.
Once you have an understanding of all the parts then you can work to make the right business decision as to how this should be run. You may want to upgrade, you may want to look to getting z/OS as a cloud service if you don't want to upgrade but you want the function. Or it may be a simple program you could move. That will be much easier to figure out once you have the details.
You say the program logic has changing for 30+ years. Was it only one person making all the changes ? Would anyone on the team have some idea about the PDS's that the user had access to ? That might be one of the places to look for. As the previous answers suggested , most shops would have store the source code in some kind of config mgmt tool like SCLM or panvelet. If you have access to the load code, there are utilities that can be used to inspect the load member to get a CSECT listing which would have the names of the obj members that make up that load.You can check with your mainframe admins. That can get you the source code file names. We use SSH from USS in our shop to move code from a HFS folder to gitlab. I have also used plain FTP to just transfer source code files to my workstation . But yes, first you have to find where it is stored.
Here is the scenario.
We are developing a product where we have a base product and regional variations for the product. We have all the common code checked into the main trunk while we have created 2 branches (branch_us, branch_uk) for the variations off of the main trunk. There is common code that is constantly being checked into the main trunk and the code that is being checked into branch_uk,branch_us is dependent on the code that is checked into the main trunk. This is being done because we expect more regions to added in future releases and as a result we want to have max reuse as well as thin regional variations layer.
Based on the current strategy, the developer will have to develop locally and then manually check-in the common files into main_trunk and regional variations into branch_uk & branch_us. Then everytime code is checked into the main_trunk, we will have to perform a merge from main_trunk->branch_uk & main_trunk->branch_us before we can perform a build for branch_uk & branch_uk (two separate deployments) because of dependency of new code in branch_uk/us branch to the new common code in main_trunk. This model seems extremely painful to think about and unproductive.
I'm by no means an expert on TFS. Here is what I am seeking opinion on:
Is there a way TFS can dynamically pull changes into branch_uk/branch_us from the main_trunk without doing a manual merge after every check-in (in the main_trunk)?
Do you guys have any other recommendations on the code management process that might be more effective/productive than the current one?
Any thoughts and feedback will be much appreciated!
This seems like a weird architecture to me, but of course I'm coming at it from a position of almost total ignorance, so there might be a compelling reason to approach it that way.
That being said: It sounds to me like you don't have a single application with two regional variations, you have two separate applications that share a common ancestor. The short answer to your question is "No". A slightly longer answer is "No, but you could write code to automate it."
A more thoughtful question-answer is "Are you sure centralized version control is the right tool for the job?" It might be more intuitive to use Git for this. What you have are, in effect, a base repository and two forks of that repository. Developers can work against whatever fork makes sense, and if something represents a change that should apply to all localizations, open a pull request to have the change merged into the base repository. This would require more discipline on the part of the developers, since they would have to ensure that their commits are isolated such that they can open a pull request that contains just commits that apply to the core platform. Git has powerful but difficult history-rewriting tools that can assist. Or, of course, they could just switch back and forth between working on the core platform, then pulling changes from the core platform back up to the separate repositories. This puts you back to where you started, but Git merges are very fast and shouldn't be a big issue.
Either way, thinking of the localizations are a single application is your mistake.
A non-source control answer might involve changing the application's architecture so that all localizations run off of the same codebase, but with locale-specific functionality expressed in a combination of configuration flags and runtime-discoverable MEF plugins, or making a "core" application platform that runs as an isolated service, and separately developed locale-specific services that express only deviations from the core application platform.
I need some concrete ideas for this.
We're looking at changing our version control system, and I'd like for us to use Mercurial. It would ease a lot of pain related to some internal processes, as well as pose some challenges.
One of those challenges is that the version control system we're currently using is not a distributed one, and thus has the concept of revision numbers for each changeset, which we've used internally.
Basically, when the programmer checks in the final change that fixes a case in our case management system, Visual Studio responds with which changeset number this became, and the programmer then affixes that to the case which basically says "If you're running a version of our product with the last version number this value, or higher, then you have all the changes in that version."
However, with Mercurial that doesn't work, as revision numbers can and will change as commits come in from different branches.
So I'm wondering how I can get something similar.
Note, this is not about release management. Releases are much more controlled, but on-going tests are more fluid, so we'd like to avoid having a tester continuously trying to figure out if the test-cases on his list are really available in the version he's testing on.
Basically, I need the ability for someone testing to see if the version they're testing on has the changes related to a test-case, or not.
I was considering the following:
The programmer commits, and grabs the hash of the changeset
The programmer affixes this to the case in our case tracker
The build process will have to tag (not in the Mercurial way) the version so that it knows which changeset it was built from
I have to make it easy to take the hash of the changeset our product was built from, look it up in the changeset log of the repository that is used for our build machine, and then figure out if the product changeset is the same as, or an ancestor of, each case in the test list.
So I have two questions:
Is this a feasible approach? I'm not adverse to creating a web application that makes this easy to handle
Does anyone know of an alternate process that would help me? I've looked at tagging, but it seems that tagging ends up adding merge pressure, is that something I want? (ie. adding/moving a tag ends up as a commit, which needs to be merged with the rest of the system)
Is there anything out there that would help me out of the box, that is, have someone made, or know of, something like this already?
Any other ideas?
Is it right to say that you're looking for a lightweight tagging process linked to your build process?
I'm not keen on the idea of the programmer grabbing the last hash and sticking it somewhere else - sounds like the sort of manual process that you couldn't rely on happening. Would you be able to build a process around programmers adding the case number to their commit message so something could later link the commit to the original case? When the case was marked as "closed" you could pick up all commits against the case.
Lots of case control systems have this - Fogbugz, for example.
Both bitbucket and google code keep a branching timeline, that shows visually what has been merged, by who, and when. I suspect that this might be what you want to do: it's a very simple way to resolve issue 4.
How they do that, I don't know, but the tools are out there. BitBucket offers commercial code hosting.
I manage a small team of developers who up till recently have all been working on independent projects.
We have now all come together to work on one holistic project and its really tough. People are changing things, without consulting other programmers and its very difficult to manage.
We are also working in a pure production environment (no test/production)
I am a bit lost on where to start, I am looking at products like Team Foundation Server or their is a product by Red gate called "Source control"
Does anyone know any good books on the above subject, I cannot be the only person in this situation? :)
Source Code:
If you're looking for how to use source control (versus how to get your team to a controlled source environment) you should check out Source Control HOWTO by Eric Sink. The disclaimer here is that he has written a source control product but the HOWTO isn't specifically tailored to it.
Database Schema:
If you're looking for how to get your database (structure not data) in source control (since it was mentioned in the title) then you should check out this Coding Horror post: Get your database under version control. It covers some basic concepts and points to a few articles on how to actually implement getting your database in source control.
Source Control Software:
If you are looking for actual source control software, a list of applications can be found here: List of Source Control Systems with Visual Studio Plugins.
Don't make the mistake I did when putting the database definition under source code control by allowing branches and merges. This led developers (and managers) to assume they could have several versions of a table in the same database, leading to programmers overwriting each others changes, and having incompatible versions of source code and table definition all over the place.
As you might well imagine this lead to a great deal of wasted time and many frayed tempers.
Depending if time or money is more important, do you have the option to being someone in for a short time with the specific task of improving your processes? They would be able to set you up a test environment, install a version-control server and get your guys (and you) up to speed.
The first thing that you need to do is to give every developer their own copy of the database.
Secondly, you need each dev to be able re-create a baseline database from the master.
Once each dev is happy with their changes to the database, you will then need them to create a series of patches for their changes.
Lastly, each one of these patches needs to be able to checked in to source-control, and re-distributed to the other devs.
If you are looking for a good source control server, consider Subversion, with Tortoise SVN as your client.
Take a look at DBSourceTools. (http://dbsourcetools.codeplex.com).
It's specifically designed to help developers use source control for database changes.
This tool will allow you to baseline your database at a specific point, and create a named version (v1).
All files are scripted to disk, and very easy to add to a Subversion repository.
Have a look at the patching process for creating and using patches.
Have fun.
I'm looking into using log shipping for disaster recovery and I'm getting mixed messages about whether to use the built-in stuff or roll my own. Which do you recommend, please, and if you favour rolling your own what's wrong with the built-in stuff? If I'm going to reinvent the wheel I don't want to make the same mistakes! (We have the Workgroup edition.) Thanks in advance.
There's really two parts to your question:
Is native log shipping good enough?
If not, whose log shipping should I use?
Here's my two cents, but like you're already discovering, a lot of this is based on opinions.
About the first question - native log shipping is fine for small implementations - say, 1-2 servers, a handful of databases, and a full time DBA. In environments like this, the native log shipping's lack of monitoring, alerting, and management isn't a problem. If it breaks, you don't sweat bullets because it's relatively easy to repair. When would it break? For example, if someone accidentally deletes the transaction log backup file before it's restored on the disaster recovery server. (Happens all the time with automated processes.)
When you grow beyond a couple of servers, the lack of management automation starts to become a problem. You want better automated email alerting, alerts when the log shipping gets more than X minutes/hours behind, alerts when the file copying is taking too long, easier handling of multiple secondary servers, etc. That's when people turn to alternate solutions.
About the second question - I'll put it this way. I work for Quest Software, the makers of LiteSpeed, a SQL Server backup & recovery product. I regularly talk to database administrators who use our product and other products like Idera SQLSafe and Red Gate SQL Backup to make their backup management easier. We build GUI tools to automate the log shipping process, give you a nice graphical dashboard showing exactly where your bottlenecks are, and help make sure your butt is covered when your primary datacenter goes down. We sell a lot of licenses. :-)
If you roll your own scripts - and you certainly can - you will be completely alone when your datacenter goes down. You won't have a support line to call, you won't have tools to help you, and you won't be able to tell your coworkers, "Open this GUI and click here to fail over." You'll be trying to walk them through T-SQL scripts in the middle of a disaster. Expert DBAs who have a lot of time on their hands sometimes prefer writing their own scripts, and it does give you a lot of control, but you have to make sure you've got enough time to build them and test them before you bank your job on it.
Have you considered mirroring instead? Here is some documentation to determine if you could do that instead
If you decide to roll your own, here's a nice guide.
I'm assuming you're going this route because Enterprise Edition is so costly?
If you don't need a "live-backup", but really just want a frequently updated backup, I think this approach makes a lot of sense.
One more thing:
Make sure you regularly verify that your backup strategy is working.
I'm pretty sure it's available in Standard, since we're doing some shipping, but I'm not sure about the Workgroup edition - it's pretty stripped down.
I'm always in favor of the packages solution, but mostly because I trust a whole team of MSFT developers more than I trust myself, but that comes with a price for sure. I'd second that any solution you roll on your own has to come with a lag notification piece so that you'll know immediately if it isn't working - how many times do we only find out backup solutions aren't working when somebody needs a backup? Also, think honestly about how much time it will take you to design and roll your own solution, including bug fixes and maintenance - can you really do it more cheaply? Maybe you can, but maybe not.
Also, one problem we ran into with Workgroup edition is that it only supports 5 connections at once, and it seems to start dropping connections if you get more users than that, so we had to upgrade to Standard. We were getting ASP.NET errors that our connections were closed if we left them unattended for even a few seconds, which caused us all kinds of problems.
I would expect this to be close to the last place you'd want to save a few bucks, especially given the likely consequences if you screw up. Would you rather have your job on the line? I don't even think I'd admit it, if I felt I had a chance of getting this one right?
What's your personal upside benefit in this?
I tried the built-in log shipping and found some real problems with it so I developed my own. I blogged about it here.
PS: And just for the record, you definitely get log shipping in the Workgoup edition. I don't know where this Enterprise-only thing started.