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Bill, > If this is the wrong list for this question please accept my apology. I think advocacy is a reasonable topic for the list. > How can I convince our developers (who are currently using > SVN) to switch to CVS, which in my opinion seems to be more > stable and reliable. CVSNT features are geared towards fulfilling the technical requirements of commercial developers - merge tracking, failsafe audit, support for reserver/unreserved etc are not so relavent for a handful of open source programmers - but are very relavent for corporate governance. However that said, it is configuration management (the processes) and not tools that provide the greatest benefits and switching tools can have a significant cost. It is not unusual for people to not account for the cost of their software systems and the impact on their business systems. There was a great article on the valuation of IT assets published in The Financial Times UK Edition 36,501 on Monday October 1 2007, and I believe the author will be releasing the complete whitepaper soon. Basically it talks about the lack of business cases for the benefit of software and also the business case for maintaining legacy assets. So if I was in your position I'd look for tangible business cases that are poorly handled by your current SCM processes and draw up a list of what the 'new' requirements are. Don't start out trying to prove CVSNT is the better tool - prove instead that your SCM system is not supporting the business and leave it to us to be developing CVSNT in directions that support the widest possible range of business processes. Eg: Research by the Configuration Management Institute has found that for CM to be effective it must make managing change easier and make the interrelationships between changes clear. Firstly you need to have metrics that show whether your SCM system is 'effective' - does it fulfill the management objectives - eg: a company approached as a while ago wanting to change their SCM because their customers were defecting to a competitor because the competitor could deliver patches to the application for each separate bug, wheras the tools the company that approached us were using did not allow them to 'manage change' (manage change sets). This may seem an odd thing for a company to begin losing customers over - but the alternative is that customers get patches they don't need in order to get the patches they do need, and every fix needs testing/qualifying for each customer in each location - this added up to a huge effort for their customers who felt they could get better (more cost effective) service elsewhere. So once you have a metric of how effective your SCM system is it may point you towards some ways where it is not supporting your business. You then draw up a list of tools that would support this new SCM process (CVSNT has user defined change sets that can be merged as a 'set', as does ClearCase, Dimensions, CM Synergy and others). You then can present the cost benefit clearly to management. > They tell me that if I can migrate all their SVN data into > CVS then they will make the move. So, its basically all or > nothing. How can I convince them and is their a documented > procedure to move these files from one system to another? I do not know of such a tools - however we do intend having a tool to migrate SVN repositories to EVSCM (CVSNT 3.x). There is some danger in trying to convince 'developers' since the business may see enormous benefit in using a tool that is less than the 'ideal' developer tool. This is a difficult balance to strike. Whilst it's my goal to have features in CVSNT that support the widest range of possible SCM processes, we also aim to make them 'developer friendly'. Supporting a 'wide range' of processes is in itself 'developer friendly' because the alternative is that some manager decides one project needs 'strict' controls - they buy clearcase and insist the entire org uses it for every project in 'strict' mode. It is not unisual for a single company using CVSNT to have some projects using strict controls and some using looser controls. Finally: once you have some clear metrics on the cost to your organisation of sticking with the current tools then you also have an idea of how much it is worth to move to something else. It may then be possible to get professional support to assist with the migration. Regards, Arthur Barrett