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Comment by foldor | Hacker News Reader

I wish I hadn't experienced this exact scenario as well. I actually worked at a publishing company where I discovered the previous team building their major education platform didn't know there was such thing as source control. Their method for sharing multiple team members changes was to email the full project to one person every Friday who would manually open a merging tool and merge all changes themselves. They would then send out the updated code base to all people again. Because of this method, they were afraid to delete any stale code, and just prefixed old versions of functions with XX. As you can imagine, inheriting that code base was a nightmare to deal with.

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I remember having this debate many years ago. Would it be better to introduce a team with no source control knowledge to something like svn first or straight to git?

Svn is easier to understand and use, but then you’d have to break some existing habits to get to git. But going straight to git might be a big step and cause reversion back to whatever system was already there.

Straight to git but have a simple and clear branching strategy. As in a full written procedure for the three main events of git. "Get code, commit code, push code".

Then disallow direct commits to master to make people work in feature branches and make merge requests through the platform (github /lab/ bitbucket). I find merging and branching locally is where people normally trip up.

Git GUI tools always make git seem way more complicated than it is so depending on the teams platform I would recommend cli from the start.

I would not start people new to git on cli. That's how you get someone's entire Camera Uploads directory committed to master (I've seen it before). I recommend Git Tower. I use it for most tasks actually even though I am comfortable in the CLI too. It tends to stop me from doing stupid things before I do them.

You can probably assume a lot of people who aren't using version control aren't using the terminal either. GUIs are generally much better at CLIs at giving you an overview of what's happening and what actions are available too.

Also, the git CLI in particular is extraordinarily terrible, given how many conceptually different things are done by the same set of commands. (For example: imagine trying to use git checkout in a repo with a file named "master" at the root level.)

Surely these days that question is answered by the existence of GitLab and several other similar tools.

Here's a vote for going straight to Mercurial (a lot easier to grok) and link to Joel Spolky's excellent tutorial

https://web.archive.org/web/20180903164646/http://hginit.com...

"Straight" to git? If you have already made up your mind, why ask?

Subversion is newer than RCS. But that doesn't mean every use of the latter can or even should be replaced.

GitHub can be used with both GIT and SVN so you don't have to choose.

I've introduced a lot of people to SVN over the past decades. Be it programmers, sysadmins, artists, translators, it's fairly quick to learn.

I couldn't begin to imagine introducing anybody to git. It's a horrible nightmare to use, even for developers, there is nothing that come close in how many times it screws up and you have to search for help on the internet.

If you haven't used any source control at all, I don't see why svn would be easier to understand than git? Using git will save you from a lot of pain up ahead so I would definitely go for git.

My limited experience with git (and none with svn) leads me to suggest someone might prefer another source control system, not because it's easier to understand per se, but because you can do simple things in it without fully understanding it.

I've supported a few svn instances. Devs could be trusted with svn, but analysts,testers, system people, ... My god the horrors these guys dream up.

Say you want to edit a few chars in a 250MB file. Why don't you, just to be sure, past that whole file in the comment field? Do that for a few 100 commits. Tortoise really hated that one, and crashed the windows explorer every time you dared look at the logs (out of memory).

Or the time some joker (His CV proudly declares 10 years of developer experience) deletes the root of the tree, doesn't know about history, and goes with his manager straight to the storage admin, who wipes everybody's commit of that day ( a few 100 people). There clearly is no need to contact someone who knows anything about subversion if the data is gone, and maybe this way nobody will notice anything and jell at them.

Or say you want to do an upgrade. Theory is every user leaves, service and network port get shut down, VM instance is backed up just to be sure, you do the svn upgrade. Of course enterprise IT means I have to write detailed instructions to every party involved and under no circumstance allowed tot look at that server myself.

So it turns out: A) some users just keep on committing straight trough the maintenance window. B) The clown who shuts down the service doesn't check if the service is actually shut down, and there is a bug in the shutdown script. So svn just keeps on running. C) The RPM containing the patch is transported by an unreliable network that actually manages to drop a few bytes while downloading from http. D) The guy who should shut down the svn network port is away eating, so they decide to skip that step. E) SVN gets installed anyway (what do you mean, checksum mismatch) and starts commiting all kinds of weird crimes to its storage. F) The VM guy panics, rolls back to the previous version, except for the mount which contains the data files. G) Then they do it all again, and mail me how the release was successful without any detail of what happened.

Let me tell you, svn really loved having its binary change right under it, in the middle of a commit, while meeting its own previous version in memory. Oh and clients having revision N+10, while the server is at version N. A problem that solves itself in a few minutes as N goes up really fast ;-)

Now thats what happens with subversion, which is rock solid and never drops a byte once committed. This company is now discovering the joys of git, where you can rewrite history whenever you feel like it.

SVN and git! Pah!!

IBM ClearCase is the way to go

Someone created a jenkins pipeline that would deploy code in a zip file into prod.

Am I missing something? Isn't this exactly how deployment servers actually work?

I'm not into Java development, but this sounds fine on the face of it, without you giving the context of how this pipeline is triggered.

Developers had a copy of code in a google drive... they'd modify it, zip it and overwrite the one in google drive, copy it to the network folder which would deploy it and delete it from the network folder... in 2016.

In theory it sounds alright. It's not great, because Jenkins is usually layered with some existing deploy framework that makes "deploy a zip file" pretty suspect. A healthier setup would look more like "build a Tomcat war file Maven, upload and deploy that with Jenkins". But in context, it sounds like the horror is that people were making and transferring a zip from local code rather than building from the tip of source control.

That’s a pretty standard CI process - zip files are often your deploy artifact (using, for example, git archive)

Yeah, except the zip file was... the input.

You pulled the code from google drive, modified it, pushed it to PROD, checked it and moved it back to google drive... and asked the other developers to update.

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