Comparison between SourceAnywhere and Vesta

Back to main page

   
SCM feature: SourceAnywhere Vesta Add to comparison: +CVS
+AccuRev
+Aegis
+AllChange
+Arch
+Bazaar
+BitKeeper
+ClearCase
+CM+
+CMSynergy
+Co-Op
+Darcs
+Git
+LibreSource Synchronizer
+Mercurial
+Monotone
+OpenCM
+Perforce
+PureCM
+Subversion
+Superversion
+Surround SCM
+svk
+Team Foundation Server
+Visual SourceSafe
Atomic Commits
Yes. Commits are atomic.
Files and Directories Moves or Renames
Yes. Both moves and renames are supported, while maintaining history. Yes. The unit of checkout/checkin is a directory tree. Files and directories can be added, deleted, and renamed between versions.
Intelligent Merging after Moves or Renames
Unknown. FILL IN.
File and Directories Copies
Copying doesn't retain history, moving does. Yes. A new package/branch can be based on any existing version without affecting the past history. (This is also an O(1) operation.)
Remote Repository Replication
Not directly possible with the included GUI or command line tools; Some SQL Server tool might be useable. Yes. Replication is a fundamental part of the design.
Propagating Changes to Parent Repositories
Not directly possible with the included GUI or command line tools; Some SQL Server tool might be useable. Yes.
Repository Permissions
Yes. SourceAnywhere Server Manager can define access to a repository per user or group and user access rights to a project. Yes. Access permissions for each package (the unit of checkout/checkin) can be different. Access permissions for a branch can be different from the basis package.
Changesets' Support
Not exactly. SourceAnywhere uses a related concept of configurations instead, which some has similar properties. Not exactly. Vesta uses a related concept of configurations instead, which some has similar properties.
Tracking Line-wise File History
Yes. (SAW annotate) No, but it would be easy to implement a tool that did this, as the Vesta repository provides direct filesystem access to all versions.
Ability to Work only on One Directory of the Repository
Yes. SourceAnywhere can define the user access right to each project and users can be restricted to work only on the projects they have check out/in right. Yes and no. The unit of checkout/checkin (called a package) is a directory tree. Most projects use more than one. Once created, a package must be checked out/in as a unit.
Tracking Uncommited Changes
Yes. Using saw diff. Yes. Intermediate immutable snapshots can be taken during an active checkout (with vadvance). These intermediate versions can be treated just like checked in versions: they can be replicated to other repositories and used as the basis for branches.
Per-File Commit Messages
No. There is no such feature. Not exactly. The unit of checkin is a directory, and commit messages are assigned at that level, not to individual files. Since configurations are also versioned, they also have commit messages.
Documentation
Good. There's an overview and tutorial on the web site, and integrated help for every command. Quite thoroughly (HTML, man pages, published papers, a book-length research report).
Ease of Deployment
Excellent. Dynamsoft SourceAnywhere is extremely easy to install. It is totally written in C++ from scratch, which means that you don't need any additional components and frameworks to support the installation. Medium to Good. There is a detailed installation guide for setting it up using a binary kit. RPMs and Debian packages have been recently released. There are no dependencies on other software. There is a bootstrap package available to build Vesta from using "make".
Command Set
Very extensive but not compatible with CVS. The command set is unrelated to CVS. Most of the time, users use about 5 commands. Few ever need to know more than about 20 commands.
Networking Support
Good. (single TCP/IP socket) Networking is inherent to the system. The repository exports both an NFS interface and an RPC interface. The checkout and checkin tools automatically contact a remote repository when required to perform an operation.
Portability
Good. The server runs on Windows only. Clients can work on any platform that SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) supports, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, SCO Unix, FreeBSD and so on. Good. It should be portable to any UNIX system. Currently it runs on Digital/Compaq/HP Tru64 UNIX and Linux on several different CPU architectures. Ports to Solaris and FreeBSD are planned but haven't begun yet.
Web Interface
Currently not. Yes: Vestaweb.
Availability of Graphical User-Interfaces.
The system is GUI-based by design. No GUIs are available, but the repository has a C++ API, and it is not hard to write one. (At least three different project-specific ones have been written by users at Compaq and Intel.)
 


Information taken from Better SCM Initiative website by Shlomi Fish (shlomif@iglu.org.il).

Reorganized for usability by Alexey Mahotkin (Version Control Blog) in 2008.

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.