mssccprj.scc files

[PACEGMBH]

Dear SourceGear support,

during our ongoing migration from MicroSoft VSS 6.0 to Vault 3.1.2 we felt badly hampered by the known issue of missing mssccprj.scc files.

We are aware of the ongoing discussion among SourceGear developers and the user community and we see the point of the arguments against default automatic creation of such files. On the other hand, in many cases having the Vault clients generate or update these files would be extremely useful for our developers.

To explain our situation in brief, some of our projects are quite large. They may contain several solutions, possibly containing projects form different folders, even different repositories, which may all be labeled independently. We have stopped getting versions "manually" long ago in favor of batch files which have turned out to be faster and much less error-prone and which we keep along with labeled versions in SCC.

The suggested path for obtaining missing mssccprj.scc files, is using "Open From Sorce Control" from inside the IDE. But this method does not provide options for retrieving older versions. In fact it tends to overwrite versions present in the working folder, effectively obliterating the version coherence that our batch files mean to ensure.

Since an older version's internal project structure may differ from the most recent one's there may be not consistent way to obtain a valid mssccprj.scc file for an older solution, at all.

Another suggested approach was to branch every release, such that in fact a most recent version of every meaningful label is present. This does not seem useful to us. Of course we do branch occasionally, but we try to limit it to the cases where we have to.

In summary, we would greatly profit from Vault clients providing an option to generate these files upon any retrieval of an .sln file. Other SCC clients, e.g. VSSConnect, seem to accomplish this without any problem. Can you tell us, whether such an option is planned and for which Vault release.

We are urgently interested in such a fix and it would certainly boost the user acceptance of Vault (as opposed to VSS), not only among our developers.

Sincerely
Armin Ortmann

[dan]

This is on our todo list, but is not scheduled for the next release yet (I'll add your vote).

If you already use a lot of batch file processing, is it possible to simply add the creation of the .scc files as part of the batch file?

[PACEGMBH]

Dan,

thanks again for the prompt reply and also for taking our vote into account.

Yes, we are considering adding something (executable, script, batch file) to our batch files. As I have heard others mentioning such workarounds, do you know of some good example code? Or could someone else post such a thing to this forum?

Nevertheless, we really think Vault clients should be able to create such files. Even if this is only offered as an option, which is off by default.

Regards
Armin

[dan]

I'm not aware of any sample code by anyone that could be used as an example.

Making this an option is a good idea - I'll add that to the feature request.