Vault Command Line clients for Linux and Solaris

[James Jeffers]

I must mention to those concerned that the rediculous hoops your customers have to go through to obtain a command line client for Vault are most annoying.

One of THE reasons we picked Vault was because the product supposedly supported Solaris and Linux. Of course, you have to provide Mono to do this. And good luck trying to build Mono on Solaris.

I would certainly say that if a compelling replacement for Vault on Linux and Solaris was offered, I would urge our migration to it. We made the decision to move away from Visual Source Safe to something - but I'm beginning to wonder if things have improved at.

It's mind boggling that you do not provide ANY sort of pre-built cross-platform binary for Linux or Solaris.

I'm also stunned at how slow and error prone the VSS import tool is. I mean, the whole point in using Vault is as a SourceSafe replacement. How often do you guys eat your own dog food and try to import SourceSafe data bases? After 3 aborted tries in 4 days (for a meager 1GB VSS db), I hope I never have the misfortune to attempt it again.

I hope that SourceGear takes this post as a constructive criticism. You seem like nice folk. I will say the merge/branch support in Vault was a nice feature and I look forward to lots of merging and branching.

Many thanks for listening.

[lbauer]

One of THE reasons we picked Vault was because the product supposedly supported Solaris and Linux. Of course, you have to provide Mono to do this. And good luck trying to build Mono on Solaris.

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We haven't tested the Vault CLC on Solaris. It has been tested on Linux and most recently, Macintosh. However, any platform that Mono supports should be able to run the Vault CLC. Details here: http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=157

Mono's website says they do support Solaris: http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page . However, a Google search on keywords Solaris and Mono resulted in number of posts by Solaris users getting errors when trying to compile Mono. Have you contacted Mono regarding the build problems you encountered?

If you do have Mono installed on Solaris and Vault is not working properly, please let us know.

It's mind boggling that you do not provide ANY sort of pre-built cross-platform binary for Linux or Solaris.

We do provide cross platform binaries for the Vault Command Line Client -- Vault.exe and the .NET assemblies. These are the same as for the Windows Client.

Maybe what you'd really like to see are GUI clients that can be installed without Mono underneath?

I'm also stunned at how slow and error prone the VSS import tool is. I mean, the whole point in using Vault is as a SourceSafe replacement. How often do you guys eat your own dog food and try to import SourceSafe data bases? After 3 aborted tries in 4 days (for a meager 1GB VSS db), I hope I never have the misfortune to attempt it again.

We imported our own VSS database into Vault and have extensively tested the Import Tool. The Import Tool is generally quite accurate in importing a VSS database, and this takes time. If there are errors, this is usually due to a configuration issue, minor database corruption or from using an untested version of the VSS Automation component. http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=7

You seem like nice folk.

We are nice folk. We're always sad to hear from customers who have given up in frustration. Please, please, contact us at the first sign of any problem. We're available on the forum and via email and phone to help get Vault working for you.

[James Jeffers]

Oh no, I haven't given up.

The point is this: providing a .NET binary for Solaris is not providing a pre-built binary. I still have to go through the work of building my own client.

The Mono sources are buildable - but it's far from error-free. I doubt Mono recieves a lot of attention for Solaris platforms and environments, based on how I've had to workaround the build process and it's many, er, assumptions.

Surely there is a way to create a platform neutral Vault access protocol. I don't care if it's published, proprietary, open source, GPL'd, or encrypted with black magic. I just want an out-of-the-box installation for non-Windows platforms, easily manipulated via emerge, pkgadd, rpm, or whatever packaage management system you happen to use.

I thought one of the BIG BIG BIG design considerations for success was to ruthlessly eliminate external dependencies. Relying on third parties to maintain and support a .NET implementation is a problem. As a customer, it's darn inconvenient. If you keep track of customer requests, add this to your list. GET AWAY FROM .NET DEPENDENCIES (for non-Windows platforms). It chaps the customers' hides.