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Comment by sehugg | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, SourceSafe. I worked for a company that used it. They had terrible intermittent file corruption issues. Long story short, we tracked down the root cause -- an Ethernet cable wrapped too tightly around a power supply brick, which caused network errors over SMB which led to file corruption. Ugh.

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> we tracked down the root cause -- an Ethernet cable wrapped too tightly around a power supply brick

I just became a little lightheaded, and my vision has gone all blurry and grey.

I hope you're claiming some sort of disability compensation from that company over the long term harm this must have caused you.

Back in the late 1990s, my team's SourceSafe repository would get corrupted weekly. Like your experience, using SMB over a slow network seemed to have a 50% chance of corrupting the repo. SourceSafe was worse than no source control...

Hehe. SourceSafe is still the standard at the state govt I work for... high tech for, say, mid 1990s, which makes it downright fancy for us.

I used SourceSafe for the better part of 10 years. The underpinning technology very much resembled RCS.

But all-in-all, it was quite serviceable for a 75,000 line C++ project. Just don't try to do branches.

That's a little bit like saying "All-in-all, this car is quite serviceable. Just don't try to use third gear."

Well, that made me chuckle, and I can't disagree. But to the other comment's post, it never lost anything for us.

Thank goodness we didn't need to do any branching.

So perhaps we can think of RCS as first gear, VS as second gear, CVS/SVN as third gear, and git as fourth gear?

Is there any vcs that would be better than any other when it comes to a serious EMI issue? And, who wraps an ethernet cable around a switch mode power supply brick?

Yes, almost any other VCS would fare better. VSS was set up so that clients could write files directly into the repository -- if the client failed for whatever reason, the repository file could get corrupted.

And salvaging a corrupted repository was a pain because SourceSafe stored your files in a munged format spread across dozens of files named aaaaaaaa, aaaaaaab, aaaaaaac, and so on. :(

The bad memories are coming back. IIRC you would mount a network drive containing the VSS files. One company I worked for had a virus which infected the repository and I don't think it was ever completely cleaned out.

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