Comments on: Why would anyone not use source control? http://jamesmckay.net/2009/06/why-would-anyone-not-use-source-control/ because there are few things that are less logical than business logic Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:14:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Rohit Arondekar http://jamesmckay.net/2009/06/why-would-anyone-not-use-source-control/comment-page-1/#comment-4041 Rohit Arondekar Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:35:29 +0000 http://jamesmckay.net/2009/06/why-would-anyone-not-use-source-control/#comment-4041 Maybe if source control was part of the filesystem you wouldn't need to enforce or preach it to anyone. I recently started using source control (subversion) for my college project and loved it. However initially it was very hard to convince my team members to start using it because they found it too cumbersome to use. And now that I think about it - if source control or rather repositories were part of the OS I think more people would use it. Maybe even non-programmers. You could possibly just mark folders as repo's and let the OS take care of checkins and checkouts and when you goof up you just ask the OS to give you an older version. I know it sounds stupid but source control is such a fantastic thing that I think everyone should be using it! :) Maybe if source control was part of the filesystem you wouldn’t need to enforce or preach it to anyone. I recently started using source control (subversion) for my college project and loved it. However initially it was very hard to convince my team members to start using it because they found it too cumbersome to use. And now that I think about it – if source control or rather repositories were part of the OS I think more people would use it. Maybe even non-programmers. You could possibly just mark folders as repo’s and let the OS take care of checkins and checkouts and when you goof up you just ask the OS to give you an older version. I know it sounds stupid but source control is such a fantastic thing that I think everyone should be using it! )

]]> By: Sam McGeown http://jamesmckay.net/2009/06/why-would-anyone-not-use-source-control/comment-page-1/#comment-3985 Sam McGeown Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:55:56 +0000 http://jamesmckay.net/2009/06/why-would-anyone-not-use-source-control/#comment-3985 Interesting that you've pinged my post from 2007, with a throw-away comment about source control - I'm pretty sure you could find a sterner argument than that! To clarify the "factors that I’m not going to get into" that I wrote at the time, the source code was on a network share which was set to create a shadow copy every hour, to retain those shadow copies for a week and was backed up at the end of the week. That was "fit for purpose" - the requirement at the time did not warrant multiple users, or more than the two branches of code development, and while I had looked into using Subversion it was (as your article states) a pain to configure. These days I do work on a project with another developer, so we do have VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN running and even my "throw-away" scripts are source controlled because I already have it running. This again is "fit for purpose" and allows us to develop concurrently. I think you have to be careful about giving a blanket statement on source control simply because you can't understand every situation, and a solution always has to be fit for purpose. I'm not arguing against source control, far from it, but you stray into dangerous territory with almost the same fervour as "Linux is the best OS, why would you not use it?" Sam Interesting that you’ve pinged my post from 2007, with a throw-away comment about source control – I’m pretty sure you could find a sterner argument than that!

To clarify the “factors that I’m not going to get into” that I wrote at the time, the source code was on a network share which was set to create a shadow copy every hour, to retain those shadow copies for a week and was backed up at the end of the week. That was “fit for purpose” – the requirement at the time did not warrant multiple users, or more than the two branches of code development, and while I had looked into using Subversion it was (as your article states) a pain to configure.

These days I do work on a project with another developer, so we do have VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN running and even my “throw-away” scripts are source controlled because I already have it running. This again is “fit for purpose” and allows us to develop concurrently.

I think you have to be careful about giving a blanket statement on source control simply because you can’t understand every situation, and a solution always has to be fit for purpose. I’m not arguing against source control, far from it, but you stray into dangerous territory with almost the same fervour as “Linux is the best OS, why would you not use it?”

Sam

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