Switched to mercurial from svn and workflow was painless for the team. Interestingly, we slowly started adopting more distributed techniques like developer merges being common. With svn, I think I was the only one who could merge and it would be rare and added product risk.

Then after about a year of mercurial we switched to git and our brains had adapted. Our team was small, 5-10 people.

Somewhat relatedly, in 2002, I worked in a large team of 75 people or so with a large codebase of a few hundred thousand lines of active dev. It used Rational ClearCase had “big merges” that happened once or twice a release with thousands of files requiring reconciliation. There was a team who did this so it was annoying to dev in, but largely I didn’t care.

Company went through layoffs and the team was down to one. He quit, the company couldn’t merge, so couldn’t release new software versions.

There was a big crisis so they went to the architects and pulled a few out of dev work. It turns out I was the one who could figure it out and dumb enough to admit it.

That sucked. It took a few weeks to sort out and modify our dev process to make merges easy and common. But it was not fun. Upside is we ended up not having any “non-programmer” op/configuration management people since the layed off/quit team were ClearCase users, who didn’t code.

Moral- don’t let people know you can do hard, mundane tasks.