History of version control - 10 astonishments

Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by sehugg on Saturday December 17, 2011 @12:25PM (#3364603)

Ugh, SourceSafe. I worked for a company that used it. They had terrible intermittent file corruption issues. Long story short, we tracked down the root cause -- an Ethernet cable wrapped too tightly around a power supply brick, which caused network errors over SMB which led to file corruption. Ugh.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by JonnieCache on Saturday December 17, 2011 @02:04PM (#3364847)

> we tracked down the root cause -- an Ethernet cable wrapped too tightly around a power supply brick

I just became a little lightheaded, and my vision has gone all blurry and grey.

I hope you're claiming some sort of disability compensation from that company over the long term harm this must have caused you.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by cpeterso on Saturday December 17, 2011 @02:35PM (#3364921)

Back in the late 1990s, my team's SourceSafe repository would get corrupted weekly. Like your experience, using SMB over a slow network seemed to have a 50% chance of corrupting the repo. SourceSafe was worse than no source control...

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by forkandwait on Sunday December 18, 2011 @12:18AM (#3366002)

Hehe. SourceSafe is still the standard at the state govt I work for... high tech for, say, mid 1990s, which makes it downright fancy for us.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by wglb on Saturday December 17, 2011 @12:36PM (#3364629)

I used SourceSafe for the better part of 10 years. The underpinning technology very much resembled RCS.

But all-in-all, it was quite serviceable for a 75,000 line C++ project. Just don't try to do branches.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by tikhonj on Sunday December 18, 2011 @08:12AM (#3366566)

That's a little bit like saying "All-in-all, this car is quite serviceable. Just don't try to use third gear."

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by wglb on Friday December 23, 2011 @07:19PM (#3387701)

Well, that made me chuckle, and I can't disagree. But to the other comment's post, it never lost anything for us.

Thank goodness we didn't need to do any branching.

So perhaps we can think of RCS as first gear, VS as second gear, CVS/SVN as third gear, and git as fourth gear?

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by mkeblx on Saturday December 17, 2011 @12:56PM (#3364674)

Is there any vcs that would be better than any other when it comes to a serious EMI issue? And, who wraps an ethernet cable around a switch mode power supply brick?

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by sehugg on Saturday December 17, 2011 @01:33PM (#3364764)

Yes, almost any other VCS would fare better. VSS was set up so that clients could write files directly into the repository -- if the client failed for whatever reason, the repository file could get corrupted.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by flomo on Saturday December 17, 2011 @02:44PM (#3364944)

The bad memories are coming back. IIRC you would mount a network drive containing the VSS files. One company I worked for had a virus which infected the repository and I don't think it was ever completely cleaned out.

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Re:History of version control - 10 astonishments by cpeterso on Saturday December 17, 2011 @02:39PM (#3364932)

And salvaging a corrupted repository was a pain because SourceSafe stored your files in a munged format spread across dozens of files named aaaaaaaa, aaaaaaab, aaaaaaac, and so on. :(

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