[OT] SalesForce + CVS

[Raf]

Hoi Dirk,

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> Raf wrote:
>> Off-topic, however, we seem to be a technologically broad group.
>> 
>> I'm trying to setup up a strategy to get multiple developers 
>> collaboratively developing against personal -in the cloud' SaleForce 
>> sandboxes and a single CVS repository.  We're using the latest Eclipse 
>> plugin and have a strategy which involves local development, refreshes from 
>> server(cloud sandbox) and deploying cvs updated changes back to the cloud 
>> sandboxes.
...
>> 
> Don't use CVS or SVN.
>
> Use something designed for this sort of distributed development model, such 
> as git or mecurial. And you will probably need someone doing QA work on the 
> revisions as well.

I'm curious as to whether this is based previous experience with 
SalesForce or if this is a best-practice suggestion?

I'd like to understand what advantage something like git would give us in 
this context?

Context: Salesforce expose 'what they call sandboxes' in the cloud.  For 
each developer's cloud sandbox we have a local 'file' based counterpart. 
The relationship between the cloud sandboxes and CVS is transitive via the 
'file' based sandboxes.  In addition to the changes we know we've made in 
the cloud, there are also lots of meta-data changes which are 
automagically conjured based on dependencies.

I've setup one sandbox for UAT and n for development.  The idea was that 
the developer sandboxes would be kept in sync via 'some version control.' 
The problem seems to be to do with committing changes which won't cleanly 
integrate into another sandbox.

What benefits would distributed version control give me in 'this' context? 
Not meant as facetious - I'm just trying to find a strategy which will 
work and want to understand whether we'd benefits from using a more 
distributed version control solution.

Thanks,

Raf