When setting up new box I had some vague ideas of trying the opensource road. The very example this post is about is source control. I have earlied talked about Sourcegear but I see alot of buzz around Subversion so hey, why not give it a shot.
While Sourcegear Vault is a fantastic product, what scared me from using it (it's free for single user - which is what I needed for my websites sourcecode - so price was not the reason) is the rather hefty system requirements for the server end. 2 GB RAM is recommended. Since it's implemented as a webservice it's also integrated with IIS - and I have an idea of NOT running iis at all on my development box (but rather in a virtual VMWare box), considering I run´the built in web server when debugging my VS2005 projects.
So - off I went. First searching for info on *WHAT* and *HOW* to install Subversion. Then trying to do it. I finally got it running as a service as I wanted. And it is indeed slick - really fast and low on resources as far as I can tell. However there were some things I didn't like about it:
1. can't check out a single file. You work on directories. That's a problem with the server end - I read somewhere they are gonna implement it in the future, but I need it now
2. can't say I found a GUI I likes. Tried out TurtoiseSVN as well as RapidSVN. While RapidSVN is pretty close to VSS interface (which I fell like I was breastfed with, more or less) - still not close enough.
So - back to reality and Sourcegear Vault. What I didn't want was to clutter my development box with the server part - so I took a shortcut and installed it on one of my public webservers. I also get the benefit of having the code at a second location.