VS2010 was the largest source repository I've ever worked on. It is structured very similar to Windows, all large projects at MS are as far as I know. It ended

VS2010 was the largest source repository I've ever worked on. It is structured very similar to Windows, all large projects at MS are as far as I know. It ended up being my job was almost entirely dedicated to just maintaining our branches: pushing our updates up to Main, and pulling in fresh changes about once a week. DevDiv has a term for this: BFD, "Branch Facilitator Developer", which for most teams is a full time job of nothing but merging code. For me it was about 70% of my job. Each branch took about 120 gigs of space on disk, and I regularly worked with about 5 branches. Merging our changes into main was a huge ordeal. We had to merge, do a full stack build (which took about 24 hours), and run every single team's tests, which took another 24 to 48 hours. From there it was a bookkeeping task of checking in on all the tests that failed and resolving them, doing performance testing, etc etc. All in all merging to main took roughly a week to pull off. The reverse was always interesting: pulling in new bits from Main to our branch was like playing Russian roulette, what was going to break this time? To add a little spice to all of this, it all took place on alpha builds of Team Foundation Server that was being developed at the same time as everything else. Fun times :)