Is Subversion better than Visual SourceSafe?
My motivation for wanting to switch to a different source control system was to allow the source control to be opened up properly over the Internet. Visual SourceSafe performs extremely badly over slow network connections. I think this is partly because the underlying file sharing is also very bad over high latency and low bandwidth networks. Visual SourceSafe also likes to keep open file handles to the database files and this is also pretty bad over the Internet. A big problem with the database format is that it is not reliable in the face of unreliable network links. Data corruption is common and it’s just not possible to use SourceSafe over any network that is prone to random failure. All in all, Visual SourceSafe is OK if all of your developers are in one location, but is a complete nightmare if you use it remotely. The thing that really sold me on Subversion though from my first few minutes of using it was the realisation that it didn’t need to mark files as read-only in order to
