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"Whether you realize it or not, if you've got a group of a thousand developers and you say "let's keep our code in Subversion" (or ClearCase, or... etc.), you'v

• DougBTX 18y ago
  You may not have read this article before: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... Here's a relevant quote from the article: In Windows, this [centralised] model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root. With a distributed system, it would be possible to send changes directly between the two groups. You might have a problem keeping the whole Windows source code repository stored locally on your development machine though.