A Poetic Tribute to Visual Source Safe

Recent source control woes have inspired me to write this little poem about my least favorite source control system.

VSS, I hate you so
And I can not wait to see you go.

You have the word safe in your name
Yet since you came
my IDE has crashed
And my files have been trashed.

If your integration were not so lame,
Then maybe I could do a simple rename;
All I wanted was a little bit of history
But a few files I did purge and now it’s all a mystery.

Branching and merging is something we no longer dare
So we copy and paste with much care;
A changeset would help reduce the friction
and make release reports seem less like fiction.

If only you would realize
that it should not take days to Analyze;
And it is wrong that I should have to be leery
when all I want to do is a simple query.

Because of your file based sharing
About disk space and security we gave up caring;
Haven’t you heard of atomic commits?
If so, perhaps my project wouldn’t be on the fritz.


If only I could create a simple diversion.
Then I could quickly upgrade to Subversion.
Perhaps if we had Perforce or Vault
Then our development wouldn’t grind to a halt.


VSS, I hate you so
And I can not wait to see you go.

For a non-rhyming look at some of the short-comings of VSS, I recommend this article by Alan de Smet.

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5 Comments so far

  1. Neil Barnwell on November 8th, 2007

    Tragically this is a really, really common story. Fortunately for my colleagues and I, we’re about to switch to Subversion in a week or two. Yay!

  2. Tom Opgenorth on November 8th, 2007

    Great poem! I’m going to have to keep a copy of this for future use.

    The sad thing is that I go to a lot of places that don’t understand why VSS has such a bad rep.

  3. Russell Ball on November 8th, 2007

    Yes, I feel fortunate that the guys here realize we have a sub-optimal solution and are willing to upgrade soon. We’ve tentatively talked about upgrading to subversion and will hopefully find some time in the next month to make it happen. I’m definitely looking forward to the switch.

  4. [...] in my voice and closed in a huff. Truth be told, I don’t think it ever forgave me for the poem I wrote about it several weeks ago. I bet SubVersion is not this sensitive to [...]

  5. [...] P.S. If you want to read a rhyming ranting by me about VSS, then check out this post [...]

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