Shares and pinning question

[VisualCSharp]

SourceGear Vault 3.0.5 (build 2833)

In Visual SourceSafe when a folder was shared, every file in the shared folder would be automatically pinned to whatever the latest version of the code was. So let's say we have this structure:

$/Project/File1.cs version 1
shared to
$/Share/File1.cs version 1

When you look at File1.cs in both places in VSS, only $/Share/File1.cs would appear with the pin icon. However, in Vault when I pin a file it appears in both places. What I want is for the shared file to be pinned to a specific version of the original file, not for both files to be locked (files are locked when they are pinned in Vault it appears).

I want to be able to check out, make changes to and check in $/Project/File1.cs and then re-pin those changes to $/Share/File1.cs. After check-in, VSS might look something like this:

$/Project/File1.cs version 2 (current)
$/Share/File1.cs version 1 (shared with $/Project/File1.cs)

In VSS I would navigate to $/Share/File1.cs and choose Show History. I would see versions 1 and 2 of File1.cs listed, but the pin icon would be displayed next to version 1. I would click Unpin and then click Pin on version 2 and voila, I've just pinned back a change from the original code to the shared code.

This is how we do the majority of our bug fixes at my company. We fix the bug in the current version and pin back changes to previous versions (shares that have specific pins).

Is this possible with Vault?

[dan]

I think the issue is that in VSS, a folder share is really a recursive file share, and in Vault, it shares the folder and all its contents. For example, if you add a file to to the shared folder, it will automatically add that file to all shared folders. It is a bit different way of thinking about what it means to share a folder. Anything underneath that folder that happens in one place happens in the others, including pins.

If you pinned the root folder that was shared, it would not pin the other links. Also, if this were a single file share (like it is in VSS), pinning it in one location would not pin it in the other locations. Because it is "secondarily" shared rather than primarily shared, all changes happen in all share links.

Hope that makes sense,

[Guest]

Yes, it sounds like Vault does sharing the way I would expect it to be done. The problem is, the people where I work are all used to SourceSafe (including myself) and are going to be very hesitant to switching over to a new source control system if all the features aren't in some way duplicated.

Is there any way to accomplish "re-pinning" using Vault the way I have described?

It sounds like what you might be saying is in order to accomplish this I must share files separately from folders?

[dan]

Yes, you'd have to share individual files rather than folders.

We do have an enhancement request to allow recursive file pinning on folders (rather than pinning the folder itself). I'll add your info to the request.