Working with Subversion the same as with Visual Source Safe in Visual Studio

Question

At work I just started using Subversion with AnkhSVN instead of Visual Source Safe. I managed to integrate it well enough but it doesn't seem the same. Using VSS the following would happen:

A user check out a file by right clicking and selecting "check out" or by editing it. If another user tried to modify the same file he would get an error. No 2 users could edit the same file at the same time. No fancy merging. No conflicts and no conflict resolutions.

I understand the the philosophy behind Subversion is different but is there any way that this behavior described above could be duplicated with Subversion?

There is an option in AnkhSVN called "Automatically lock files on change..." but even if I activate this option when I edit a file it never gets automatically locked. Even if this option worked the other users wouldn't see the lock until they commited the file. They wouldn't get an error when they tried to edit it like they would in Visual Source Safe.

So basically: can Visual Source Safe's behavior be duplicated using Subversion and AnkhSVN?

Answer 1

The point of using subversion over source safe is that you don't have exclusive lock and many people can work on the same file.

You are loosing quite a lot of the benefits of SVN if you start using it with exclusive locks on files.

The idea is that you fix conflicts during merges of code.

See this SO question and answers for a bit of a discussion on the issues (Revision control locking: Is the jury still out?).

Answer 2

The Agent SVN is a MS-SCCI plugin (just like VSS) for Subversion so it integrates with Visual Studio just like VSS.

It also has a Lock on check out option and with that feature on it does feel a lot like VSS.