That's incorrect [LWN.net]

That's incorrect

Posted May 1, 2008 22:27 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Subversion considers its future by dmag
Parent article: Subversion considers its future

I play in both the corporate development world and the free software world, and anyone who thinks that corporate software development could be possible without a VCS is sorely mistaken. On the contrary, a VCS is vital.

What is a debatable issue is whether a distributed revision control system is useful for the typical corporate software development process. In the typical corporate development flow, the centralized database is a key feature, used to enforce policies, and often tightly coupled to bug tracking, performance reviews, the works. Distributed repositories could help individual developers experiment with changes on a local basis, but management isn't going to like it because they can hide information from management (which might be a good thing if you sit on the other side of the divide).

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That's incorrect

Posted May 5, 2008 3:23 UTC (Mon) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182) [Link]

> I play in both the corporate development world and the free software 
> world, and anyone who thinks that corporate software development could be 
> possible without a VCS is sorely mistaken. On the contrary, a VCS is 
> vital.

I am in total agreement. I also play both in corporate development as well as free software
world. Anyone who claims corporate development can work without VCS has never worked in one.
With projects having upwards of 400 developers actively committing every day, do you guys
seriously believe corporates can manage with a tar ball?

I don't know if a distributed VCS would be very useful in a corporate setup. One of the
biggest advantages of a distributed VCS (as I understand it) is to allow experimentation with
a private branch.  In a centralized VCS, a private branch gets created for this but it still
stays centralized. "Distributed" in corporate development usually means a centralized but
multi-site VCS.

That's incorrect

Posted May 5, 2008 11:51 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Sure they can manage with a tarball. Everyone shares one huge build tree 
with all the source code and generated binaries in it: it gets `make 
clean'ed and tarred every night.

(Not only have I worked at places that did this, *not even the tarring job 
was automated*. People can put up with a lot if they have no idea anything 
better is possible.)