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0 pointsdrewcoo2y ago0 comments

SD was basically P4 with syntactic sugar. You likely didn't have permissions to create branches.

Windows sources 20 years ago used to have a ridiculously complicated branching strategy, driven by middle managers and made worse by having actual devs sneak around the edges to do "buddy builds" of changes with some godawful batch file that I heard may have originated with RaymondC (who was exactly the kind of person to make ridiculous MSFT somehow bearable for the rest of us). It was Conway's Law, somehow twisted and applied to version control. With permissions SNAFUs.

I still see companies today trying to map their org chart into their branching strategy and just shake my head . . . and run away.

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Kwpolska2y ago

Did branching in SD work the Git way (where creating a branch is instantaneous and requires zero resources), or did it work the TFVC/old-style-VCS way, where a branch required creating a copy of all files and took many minutes (probably hours at NT scale)? If you are stuck with this kind of system (why would you be these days?), long lived team branches would be the only sustainable strategy.

inglor2y ago

> You likely didn't have permissions to create branches

I did, it was just a very long and complicated process. You had to set up a lot of tooling for it and you were strongly discouraged from doing it so in the year of SourceDepot (on Office) I saw this option being used exactly once.

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Kwpolska2y ago

inglor2y ago

> You likely didn't have permissions to create branches

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse