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Any code base?? I question your depth of exposure.

by DougN7 2y ago

seadan83 2y ago
Been programming since 98, professionally since 08. If a codebase has no VCS.. that seems almost ideological. I've done a git init on a linux file system to understand patch changes. With that aside, what does disaster recovery look like without VCS? Remote backups ate an obtuse form of VCS. If your laptop explodes, are you losing months of work? I mentor junior devs to push daily, if their laptop blows up I want them set up again in 30 minutes with at most one days worth of work lost (because they push their branches remotely, if only for the redundancy. Doing so daily makes it easy to recreate what was lost, compared to a week or two of effort). Without VCS, integration is s larger challenge. It can be done, but continuously and also efficiently? Seemingly we are talking about non collaborative code bases, a vanishingly small subset of projects. Most software is developed by teams. Last, it is so damn easy to run 'git init'. My last job - the team used git locally and then did the stuff in TFS when they finally had to. The point is how easy and useful it was. The other guy that did his own thing, did not use VCS, his stuff was scary. His code was disaster if it stopped building, of if we lost his laptop. Which is to say, VCS is an underpinning for CI & CD, DR, and is stupid easy to get the init setup done. Just about any codebase - yeah. Even if that means doing git locally and then throwing it away. It is different to choose to not use all the tools compared to not being able to use them, and yet another to be unwilling to learn them either due to prejudice.
- DougN7 2y ago
  I agree with you. I misread “VCS” for “git” and that’s where my (mistaken) disagreement came from.
seadan83 2y ago
Second response after having thought about your question a bit longer, re: "any code base" First, VCS is a generic term. Saving files to a backup is a VCS, zipping and sending files via email is a VCS. What kinds of system use VCS as their underpinnings? Build systems, disaster recovery systems, deployment systems, more... Without VCS, you can't have those systems, and which code bases require none of those systems? Perhaps we are talking mostly demo projects, small ad-hoc scripts. Would you posit other examples perhaps? My perspective is that it is so trivially damn easy to get a VCS set up locally, even a distributed one, that while - yes - you can live without it - in what cases should you really be living without it? Particularly in light of all the downstream dependencies of a VCS. Maybe we disagree on the ROI of VCS? I can understand someone not building a CI/CD pipeline because it is kinda costly and maybe won't be used enough to justify it. With Git (VCS), there was a time period where I was new to it and was corrupting files left and right. Getting past that, the cost to set up & use is absurdly tiny, my daily workflow has had no issues for years now. Perhaps there is a difference in perspective there? That you view the ongoing cost to be really large? So much so, that a cat walking across your keyboard is so rare and the daily pain so large, that you have a different perspective on the ROI?

Any code base?? I question your depth of exposure.

by DougN7 2y ago

Any code base?? I question your depth of exposure.

Been programming since 98, professionally since 08. If a codebase has no VCS.. that seems almost ideological. I've done a git init on a linux file system to understand patch changes. With that aside, what does disaster recovery look like without VCS? Remote backups ate an obtuse form of VCS. If your laptop explodes, are you losing months of work? I mentor junior devs to push daily, if their laptop blows up I want them set up again in 30 minutes with at most one days worth of work lost (because they push their branches remotely, if only for the redundancy. Doing so daily makes it easy to recreate what was lost, compared to a week or two of effort). Without VCS, integration is s larger challenge. It can be done, but continuously and also efficiently? Seemingly we are talking about non collaborative code bases, a vanishingly small subset of projects. Most software is developed by teams. Last, it is so damn easy to run 'git init'. My last job - the team used git locally and then did the stuff in TFS when they finally had to. The point is how easy and useful it was. The other guy that did his own thing, did not use VCS, his stuff was scary. His code was disaster if it stopped building, of if we lost his laptop. Which is to say, VCS is an underpinning for CI & CD, DR, and is stupid easy to get the init setup done. Just about any codebase - yeah. Even if that means doing git locally and then throwing it away. It is different to choose to not use all the tools compared to not being able to use them, and yet another to be unwilling to learn them either due to prejudice.

DougN7 2y ago
I agree with you. I misread “VCS” for “git” and that’s where my (mistaken) disagreement came from.

seadan83 2y ago

Second response after having thought about your question a bit longer, re: "any code base" First, VCS is a generic term. Saving files to a backup is a VCS, zipping and sending files via email is a VCS. What kinds of system use VCS as their underpinnings? Build systems, disaster recovery systems, deployment systems, more... Without VCS, you can't have those systems, and which code bases require none of those systems? Perhaps we are talking mostly demo projects, small ad-hoc scripts. Would you posit other examples perhaps? My perspective is that it is so trivially damn easy to get a VCS set up locally, even a distributed one, that while - yes - you can live without it - in what cases should you really be living without it? Particularly in light of all the downstream dependencies of a VCS. Maybe we disagree on the ROI of VCS? I can understand someone not building a CI/CD pipeline because it is kinda costly and maybe won't be used enough to justify it. With Git (VCS), there was a time period where I was new to it and was corrupting files left and right. Getting past that, the cost to set up & use is absurdly tiny, my daily workflow has had no issues for years now. Perhaps there is a difference in perspective there? That you view the ongoing cost to be really large? So much so, that a cat walking across your keyboard is so rare and the daily pain so large, that you have a different perspective on the ROI?