Hacker News Reader

Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

My first professional coding job used SourceSafe which was lock-based so you couldn't even do concurrent versioning. Everyone had to take turns with the files.

View on HN

Source safe had no real server. So if you faced a difficult merge because your colleague just committed something huge, you could just set your clock back and commit before him, walk over to his desk and tell him he broke the build.

Or just delete the source safe files from the share and have everybody in a panic (this happened where I worked in ~2010 for some legacy apps still in source safe...it was an untrained user trying to undo a change).

SourceSafe also allowed you to checkout files in non-exclusive mode which made it more like CVS. It also had a way to share files across different directories, a feature we emulated in CVS by symlinking files in the CVS_ROOT.

Also, fun fact: SourceSafe was the first cross platform VCS I used. There were Mac, Unix, and dos/windows versions. Then Microsoft bought it and axed everything except dos/windows. :-(

Our merge strategy with SourceSafe was to always do a 3 way merge (using Araxis) between:

- your latest changes

- version of the code before you made changes

- latest version of the code on the server

So yes, would have 3 full checkouts of the project locally to accomplish this. I guess it boils down to "patch" workflow, except you get to both create and apply the patch yourself. We used a real-world commit token (rubber duck IIRC) to make sure only one person was doing merges at a time...

(Tortoise)SVN was an easy sell when we discovered it.

Perforce was like that when I used it. (> 2009)

Why people liked it or even tolerated it still puzzles me.

Edit: While I'm sure this was what I experienced it might be because of configuration by the organization I worked for, but I doubt it as I remember reading everything I could find about Perforce since I disliked it so much and wanted to find out why everyone seemed to like it.

When you're working with binary, unmergeable files it's a mandatory requirement.

FWIW you could configure P4 to only lock certain file extensions. I also found it useful to find out who was "working" on a file if I had to touch it.

Perforce has supported concurrent versioning since at least 2001 if not earlier. Individual files could be marked as requiring locks which is useful for binary files for which concurrent changes cannot be merged (one of the big reasons why Perforce is so popular in game development), but it's not either the default or only option. It sounds like your organization had severely misconfigured Perforce.

Mine first was using SourceOff Site (Source Safe extension).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com