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I worked in a software company once where we acquired a product to integrate into ours. It was developed by a self taught programmer in his 50ies that did versi
by Tistron 7y ago
I worked in a software company once where we acquired a product to integrate into ours.
It was developed by a self taught programmer in his 50ies that did versioning by making copies of the whole directory when he had something that worked, the way I also worked before university.
Since he was the only developer and he was pretty good this mostly worked. His first name was/is Leif so from then on me and my friends speak of this style of "version control" as "using Leif Points". I guess because it is phonetically somewhat close to Save Points like in some computer games.
- Are we using git or Leif Points for this project?
- eh, how about git?
This story sounds like they also used Leif Points, but for their database :O
- narag 7y agoI won't name the offender, but a well-known company I worked for did something funnier: zipping entire directory and checking the zip files in Visual Source Safe.
- masklinn 7y agoGiven how broken VSS is, that might have been safer than using VSS as if it worked properly.
- narag 7y agoLOL, I used it in 1996-97 and it worked OK for a modest setup with only six users and blocking at file level. Later heard some horror stories from people working at big shops, but no worse than svn stories, anyway I haven't seen any of those.
- mikestew 7y agoAbout your time of using VSS, I was working at Microsoft in developer support (working on COM data access, and not VSS, thank $DEITY). It was fine for small internal stuff we’d do, the stories I heard from industrial-strength use did not instill confidence for anything more than a half-dozen devs. OTOH, we shipped small components for a larger product using VSS, and I don’t recal any issues. Hated the workflow and interface, but it worked
- beardedman 7y agoWhy would you call out someone like that?
- masklinn 7y agoTBF making tarballs and storing that was how many projects used to work. Linus did that until they got Bitkeeper & git, he refused to use any existing VCS before that.
- IshKebab 7y agoTo be fair VCS before that sucked pretty badly.
- kexx 7y agoI use TFS for source control, but still also use Leif Points (like scheduled backup of the project every day to a local storage) in case of something messed up by the server. So don't underestimate the old guy :)