Accurev SCM [closed]

Answer 1

We use AccuRev for 4 years already. I hate it very much, mostly because of its horrible GUI. Several years ago AccuRev sent a survey for their clients to fill and at the end of the survey there was a field with suggestions. I started collecting things which annoy me the most, and below you'll find what I have now. Unfortunately, it's full of AccuRev terminology, but I think you'll get the idea anyway.

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Accurev GUI possible improvements

Working with history

When examining history, a developer most often wants to see diff to previous transaction/version. This should be as accessible as a double click. For example double-clicking on file in transaction log could open diff to previous version. Double-clicking on a file in Default Group filter could open diff to backed, double-clicking on a file in Modified search could open diff to most recent. That would save tons of time.

Common experience is that developers rarely open files for editing from within AccuRev. Rather they very often diff files, then revert or promote changes. So double click should not open files for editing, it should diff them instead. This may be an option in preferences, so different people may decide whether they want double click to diff files or open files.

It should be possible to select two transactions in stream or workspace history and perform a file diff between them.

Overlaps merging

Merging overlaps in a stream requires performing "Deep Overlap" search in a workspace that takes much more time than to search overlaps in specific stream. Then it is needed to sort overlaps by overlap stream and merge only those from specific stream. There should be more convenient way to perform merging overlaps in stream. For example ability to limit deep overlap search by specific stream and do not show overlaps in parent streams. Limiting Deep Overlap search by timelocked stream is not very useful if you are several streams under this timelocked stream or there is no timelock on parents at all.

Now there is a simplified way that involves creating change palettes, but it is still not convenient. Merge menu item should be available at stream level if there is a workspace under that stream that may be used for overlaps merge.

Annotate tool

Annotate tool is very awkward:

• using slider at the top to browse different version resets position in the file that is VERY annoying for large files;
• should be able to open history at the specific transaction directly from annotate tool. Now developer needs to remember transaction# and search for it in stream history (also need to search for the stream where transaction was made).

Stream Favorites

Context menu item "Add to stream filter" was removed when new stream favorites were introduced. It should be possible to right click on stream and add it to one of the stream favorites (2nd level context menu, or dialog may pop up). Now it is very annoying to edit stream favorites, particularly when you need to have 2 similar sets of streams.

Stream browser

It should be easy to copy stream name to clipboard. Now you need to open "Change stream" dialog for that. Ctrl+C in stream browser could copy the name of selected stream to clipboard. There is no way to copy stream name from stream view. Right click on tab could copy stream name in clipboard, or show context menu with "copy stream name to clipboard" item in it.

Diff and merge tool

Shows only the first different character in line, not the whole line difference, does not highlight syntax. Luckily, diff tool may be easily switched to external tool, so this is minor.

Other suggestions

• Option in preferences to enable Multiple columns sort mode by default.
• It would be nice to save not only the latest keep/promote log, but at least 5-10 older ones.
• File extension column in stream or workspace view with ability to sort on it would be great.
• Reordering tabs would be nice.
• Very small font in keep/promote/lock message under Windows, it's unreadable. Increase the font size or allow user to change it.
• Implement more convenient way to locally ignore files, environment variable is not very useful (user may want to ignore different sets of files in different streams/depots).

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For the last 3 years AccuRev added 3 things from this list (I removed them as they are already implemented):

• Hardcoded (can't be customized) keyboard shortcuts for most actions
• Made it possible to call diff for several files from transaction at once (before that one should have to right click on every file and call "Diff to previous version" from context menu.
• Added search for text to Annotate tool. But because of the position reset when you try to switch to different version (see above) the Annotate tool is still unusable.

Besides GUI there are fundamental flaws in AccuRev in the whole:

Difficult to update backwards

You can't easily update backwards. There is accurev update -t <transaction-number> command, but if you updated to transaction 100, you can't update to transaction 95 using accurev update -t 95. In order to do that you need to set up time lock on your backed stream (which will introduce transaction in AccuRev) and update your workspace.

Deep Overlaps

When you update you may happen to have invalid state of sources without any notice. This is because Overlaps feature. Overlap is basically a conflict (when file is changed by both you and them). If you have overlap in your workspace, you'll need to merge it before you are allowed to update. But if you have overlap in the stream, under which you have your workspace, you won't have any notice about that, but overlapped file won't be updated in your workspace. Consider the following stream structure

[Depot Root] <- [Team stream] <- [Your stream] <- [Your workspace]

Let's say you changed foo.cpp and promoted it to [Your stream]. After that someone from your team changed both foo.h and foo.cpp, let's say added method to the class Foo, and promoted the files to [Team stream]. After you update your workspace, you'll get new version of foo.h (because you didn't change it), but you won't get foo.cpp because it's overlapped in [Your stream]. So, your update will go clean, but linker will complain about unresolved symbol Foo::NewMethod if you try to build after that.

Answer 2

Note: I am an AccuRev user and I like it very much. I have already upvoted a few answers here, and would like to add:

I've just recently stumbled over this "review" of AccuRev in the book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley:

[Chapter 14, p 385]

Commercial Version Control Systems

(...) the only commercial VCSs that we are able to wholeheartedly recommend are:

• (...)
• AccuRev. Offers ClearCase-like ability to do stream-based development without the crippling administrative overhead and poor performance associated with ClearCase.
• (...)

To which I might add that I never have used ClearCase, but I am the AccuRev admin around here, and it is indeed very little work to administer. (WRT performance, this question might give more insight.)

Answer 3

One of the best days I've ever had at my current job is they day we ditched Accurev and moved to Subversion. Accurev uses overly complicated concepts. Like one of the commenters above, after working with it for years, I still didn't understand the different states that artifacts could be in. It seems that Accurev's greatest asset is its whitepapers and stream visualization, both of which are v appealing to management but does nothing for developers. I use Subversion, Mercurial and Git for various projects and would recommend these tools over any other.

Answer 4

I've been a long time Accurev user, and have recently moved to a job where I'm using Perforce. I gotta tell you, I wish I had Accurev back. I do agree - the UI is slow and has problems.

However there are some truly AWESOME visualization tools in there. I can't believe that anyone would look at the version history browser and not fall in love! The stream browser is a great simple tool to understand what is going on in your development organization.

Also, dirt simple to administer. Accurev is actually one of my favourite tools.

Answer 5

Accurev is simply the worst tool I have ever used.

Subversion is very good, esp if you are migrating from cvs.

Answer 6

After 4 months, my very negative opinion hasn't changed at all. While Accurev has some very nice concepts, the slowness and complexity far outweigh the advantages, at least for us. Aside from the usual complaints about the GUI and the obscurity of a number of features, one of the absolutely most annoying faults is how many hoops you have to jump through just to update a workspace, made much worse by the inability to update only one directory (or directory tree).

A typical update consists of waiting a loooong time to be told you have overlaps. Of course, you aren't told what the overlaps are. So, you have to do an overlap search, wait another loooong time, resolve the overlaps, do another update, wait a looooong time, and hope it worked this time.

Some of our remote developers update as infrequently as possible because the update time over VPN is absurd. Granted, we have an enormous number of source files across a number of products, and if we reorganized everything we could probably improve performance.

However, we hired Accurev (at a significant cost) to come in and tell us how to set everything up. Still sucks. Aside from that, we really shouldn't have to reorganize the way we work with our sources to suit a source-code-control system. It's a tool, not a business model.

Lastly, we've been trying out an Accurev plugin for IntelliJ, written by Accurev. It works just as poorly as the rest, and, while Accurev has been very responsive about fixing the plugin, we aren't their QA group, nor did we sign up to be an alpha test site (yes, it's that buggy). We finally gave up and wrote our own plugin that actually works.