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Comment by Fuxy | Hacker News Reader

Stuff may happen but I would put replacing the module I lost to the source code to pretty high on the list of things that need fixing.

There is no way I could rely on something like that.

Am I the only one that thinks relying on something that has no source code is just asking for trouble and headaches in the future?

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Then there is the situation where, one day, your source code control system tells you there are no files .... because someone in the org you are working at figured noone was using the server and wiped it. This really happened on a job I was on. Luckily we still had source dotted around a dozen or so machines, at various levels of up-to-datedness, so it was possible (with a load of scripting code generating some helpful timeline pix) to forensically reconstruct not just the tip but a decent portion of the history too. Fun times.

No, you're not the only one. But, at the same time, it isn't always the absolute top priority. Right now I'm working on a couple of systems that have had a few mystery DLLs in them. Not necessarily anything lacking source code - it's around "somewhere" - but certainly things we've lacked the immediate capability to rebuild.

But those DLLs aren't the only, or the biggest, problems with the systems. Hence finding the source and building them from it isn't necessarily the top priority, although we are progressively doing exactly this.

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