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I feel like we're well into the longtail now. Are there other SCM systems or is it the end of history for source control and git is the one and done solution?
I feel like we're well into the longtail now. Are there other SCM systems or is it the end of history for source control and git is the one and done solution?
Mercurial still has some life to it (excluding Meta’s fork of it), jj is slowly gaining, fossil exists. And afaik P4 still does good business, because DVCS in general and git in particular remain pretty poor at dealing with large binary assets so it’s really not great for e.g. large gamedev. Unity actually purchased PlasticSCM a few years back, and has it as part of their cloud offering. Google uses its own VCS calle…
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Thank you! Btw, it reminds me of the book "Showstopper" about the journey of releasing Windows NT; highly recommended!
Thanks for the recommendation! I was just about to reread "Soul Of A New Machine", but will try Showstopper instead, since it sounds to be the same genre.
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You’d be surprised at the amount of people at Microsoft that their entire career have been at Microsoft (pre-git-creation) that never used Git. Git is relatively new (2005) but source control systems are not.
That's still two decades. Git is so popular Microsoft bought one of the major forges 7 years ago. To have never touched it in the last decade? You've got a gap in your CV.
Turn it around: If I were to apply for a job at Microsoft, they would probably find that my not using Windows for over twenty years is a gap on my CV (not one I would care to fill, mind).
I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe… They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…
I doubt most teams ever used it. I spent a couple years at Microsoft and our team used Source Depot because a lot of people thought that our products were special and even Microsoft's own source control (TFS at the time) wasn't good enough. I had used TFS at a previous job and didn't like it much, but I really missed it after having to use Source Depot.
It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.
This article makes out thousands of engineers that are good enough to qualify at Microsoft and work on Office but haven't used git yet? That sounds a bit overplayed tbh, if you haven't used git you must live under a rock. You can't use Source Depot at home. Overall good story though
Sure you can use Source Depot (actually Perforce) at home: https://www.perforce.com/p/vcs/vc/free-version-control
TFA throws some shade at how "a single get of the office repo took some hours" then elides the fact that such an operation was practically impossible to do on git at all without creating a new file system (VFS). Perforce let users check out just the parts of a repo that they needed, so I assume most SD users did that instead of getting every app in the Office suite every time. VFS basically closes that gap on git ("VFS for Git only downloads objects as they are needed").
Perforce/SD were great for the time and for the centralised VCS use case, but the world has moved on I guess.
I’d like to know when Microsoft internally migrated away from Visual SourceSafe… They should have recalled it to avoid continued public use…
I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.
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I doubt most teams ever used it. I spent a couple years at Microsoft and our team used Source Depot because a lot of people thought that our products were special and even Microsoft's own source control (TFS at the time) wasn't good enough. I had used TFS at a previous job and didn't like it much, but I really missed it after having to use Source Depot.
I was surprised that TFS was not mentioned in the story (at least not as far as I have read). It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.
NT created (well not NT itself, IIRC, there was some an MS-internal developer tools group in charge)/moved to source depot since a shared file-system doesn't scale well to thousands of users. Especially if some file gets locked and you DoS the whole division.
Source depot became the SCCS of choice (outside of Dev Division).
Then git took over, and MS had to scale git to NT-size scale, and upstream many of the changes to git mainline.
Raymond Chen has a blog that mentions much of this - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
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I didn't even know Microsoft SourceSafe existed.
We used it. We knew no better. It was different then, you might not hear about alternatives unless you went looking for them. Source Safe was integrated with Visual Studio so was an obvious choice for small teams. Get this; if you wanted to change a file you had to check it out. It was then locked and no-one else could change it. Files were literally read only on your machine unless you checked them out. The 'one at…