HELP: Version Control Software?

[Timmy Chong]

Hi, 


Our company has been around since 1995, and the Owner and main developer has never used any version control software. 


To cut the story short, he doesn't think researching and deciding on a version control software is a good use of our time. But its literally impeding on our existent workflow (if you can call it that), coding is getting overwritten, (USA developers work during day time here, and Overseas developers work during night time in USA (daytime there). 


I was looking at GIT and couple others, does anyone else have some experience with version control software? And does it work well with Powerbuilder? I read some limitations that the migration isn't perfect for power builder when using GIT, but i've also read that others had no problems. 


We also try to keep most of the logic in the backend (SQL), is there any version control software that can keep track of both? 


I've looked at red-gate for SQL Script managing, because this also gets overwritten as well. 


http://www.red-gate.com 



RedGate also manages for .NET as well. This might be our solution, if we convert our whole System from PowerBuilder to .NET. Which i want to avoid until absolutely necessary (EX: PowerBuilder is no longer supported) 



Also if someone can advise, should we stick to PowerBuilder? Since SAP bought PowerBuilder, there hasn't been too many improvements and there are bugs here and there and I'm afraid they might discontinue it. 
In which we would have to slowly Migrate to .NET or Swift (if it gets adopted universally) 


Just wanted some advice and thoughts. 

Thank you 

[Chandrasekar (Chan) Ponnusamy]

Timmy Chong, 

Let me put it in perspective here. You are looking for 2 things - 1. You want to find the best source control for your Powerbuilder source code and your SQL source code. 2. You want to know if its time to get out of PowerBuilder.

For #1 I would say I have had better luck using PBSCC and Tortoise SVN for maintaining PB code. I have been a PB developer for 20 years now and I can say that so far PBSCC is the best solution I have come across for PB. As for SQL code, we store them in Tortoise SVN. Just before releasing the code we update the SVN copy with the latest changes.

For #2 I would say, if you have a choice get out of PB now. I know people have predicted PB's death even 10 years ago, but I tell you its been a slow death march this past decade and PB is in life support. Get out while you can. Just my 2 cents!

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[Ben]

In our company, we had this issue of a legacy powerbuilder application which for almost 20 years had only one developer, and we wished to add another developer.  I ended up with the same set up as Chandrasekar: PBSCC with TortoiseSVN and subversion.  The subversion server we put on a linux machine sp we used Putty for our SSH connection from client to server.  All this took quite a bit of effort to set up.  I have a document I wrote to help the other developer get set up.. if you would like it, email me direct, it will tell you a lot about the client side configuration that took me a week or so to figure out.

But, one warning.  We actually had quite a lot of problems with the setup, weird behavior with PBSCC.  Apparently there is a race condition that occurs with certain versions of windows with certain versions of PBSCC etc etc etc.  It worked locally fine but then going over VPN it became flaky.  It's a known problem and I tried to work it out but never totally could.  Perhaps if you are more of a Windows developer than I am, you could compile PBSCC from source and fix the bug, which is what I tried to do.  It wasn't the C++ code that daunted me.. I'm comfortable with that.. it was the process of getting the code to build in VC++ that I finally gave up on.

Or, if you have MS VSS (Visual Source Safe), perhaps it will not have this problem that occurred with SVN.

Re git, its paradigm is not a natural fit for the way pb wants to lock files etc.. I never could get it working with any of the available adapters.. but again, if you want to avoid potentially facing the issues I faced with svn, you can try it...

In our case, the whole purpose of the exercise and reason for us wanting to ramp up development on the powerbuilder application was so that we could convert it from using the old Sybase database it was using, to Postgres.. so that it could share data with new applications using Postgres.  We accomplished that.  But ultimately we realized that we preferred to rewrite all the functionality of the pb application as a web-based application, so I did that...  The version control problem went away because the original developer doesn't work on the project anymore.. I still use the PBSCC+Tortoise+Putty+SVN stack and it does work for me because I am on the LAN with the SVN server.  But at this point I am not adding anything new to the pb app, mainly just modifying the pb app to disable functionality that's been moved to the web application.. so there's very little version control activity.

Ben