Question

A client still uses Visual SourceSafe, but after showing the numerous dangers and deficiencies of VSS, they’ve decided to migrate from VSS to SVN Subversion.

The choice-to-be seems Tortoise SVN with AnkhSVN (good choice?). A migration aid is described here. The project contains two websites, a few web applications, several control and function libraries.

It seems to me that a “sweep all VSS related” and then “import in SVN” is the way to go. But worlds aren’t perfect. What are the problems we should watch out for and what measures can we take to have this process run smoothly? Are there typical SVN for .NET issues that we should be aware of?

EDIT: is it possible somehow to migrate the VSS history too, or should we consider this a new start only?

Answer 1

We made the same migration a few years ago and were very pleased with the results. Like Pino, I recommend Tortoise SVN. AnkhSVN didn’t seem to do work well for us. I don’t know of a practical way of migrating the history.

The major problems we encountered were due to the nature of Subversion itself and not with the migration. The problems we encountered were:

1. Learning to work with merging and not exclusive checkouts.
2. Learning that nothing is ever deleted in Subversion. So adding your installer with prerequisites and then deleting it will not reduce the size of the repository. Our current backup size is 4GB+ compressed.
3. Backups require a bit of scripting, unlike SourceSafe which was a simple file copy. svnadmin hotcopy worked for us.
4. We found that ‘user branches’ where each user has a different branch did not work for us. We now have a single trunk for all users.
5. It was possible to commit a change without a comment. You can fix this with a pre-commit hook.
6. Giving up on MS Visual Studio integration. Not as bad as it sounds.