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Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

danielsada.tech

121–130 of 290 posts

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which is exactly how CVS (and its predecessors RCS and SCCS) worked.

They were file based revision control, not repository based.

SVN added folders like trunk/branches/tags that overlaid the file based versioning by basically creating copies of the files under each folder.

Which is why branch creation/merging was such a complicated process, because if any of the files didn't merge, you had a half merged branch source and a half merged branch destination that you had to roll back.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#122
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not everyone wants to code for hobby, so if their work not uses git then they too will not use it.

Agreed. In my professional career, the vast majority of devs I've worked with never wrote a single line of code outside of the office.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#123
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what inspired the "Exchange: The Most Feared and Loathed Team in Microsoft" license plate frames? I'm probably getting a bit of the wording wrong. It's been nearly 20 years since I saw one.

Probably. A lot of people really loved MSMAIL; not so much Exchange. I have more long, boring stories about projects there, but that’s for another day

And sometimes they loved MSMAIL for the weirdest reasons...

MSMAIL was designed for Win3.x. Apps didn't have multiple threads. The MSMAIL client app that everyone used would create the email to be sent and store the email file on the system.

An invisible app, the Mail Pump, would check for email to be sent and received during idle time (N.B. Other apps could create/send emails via APIs, so you couldn't have the email processing logic in only the MSMAIL client app).

So the user could hit the Send button and the email would be moved to the Outbox to be sent. The mail pump wouldn't get a chance to process the outgoing email for a few seconds, so during that small window, if the user decided that they had been too quick to reply, they could retract that outgoing email. Career-limited move averted.

Exchange used a client-server architecture for email. Email client would save the email in the outbox and the server would notice the email almost instantly and send it on its way before the user blinked in most cases.

A few users complained that Exchange, in essence, was too fast. They couldn't retract a misguided email reply, even if they had reflexes as quick as the Flash.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The lock approach is still used in IC design for some of the Cadence/Synopsis data files which are unmergable binaries. Not precisely sure of the details but I've heard it from other parts of the org.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#125
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which is exactly how CVS (and its predecessors RCS and SCCS) worked. They were file based revision control, not repository based. SVN added folders like trunk/branches/tags that overlaid the file based versioning by basically creating copies of the files under each folder. Which is why branch creation/merging was such a complicated process, because if any of the files didn't merge, you had a half merged branch source…

CVS was called the “concurrent version system” because it did not lock files on checkout. Nor did svn. Perforce does.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#126
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#127
post #16

In about 2010, I briefly had a contract with a security firm with one dev, and there was no source control, and everything written was in low quality PHP. I quit after a week.

What kind of security services did they provide? Breaches?

Job security for the dev, probably.

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#128
post #102

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?

Perforce is used in game dev, animation, etc. git is pretty poor at dealing with lots of really large assets

why is this still the case ?

Re: Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The file lock was a fun feature when a developer forgot to unlock it and went on holidays. Don't forget the black hole feature that made files randomly disappear for no reason. It may have been the worst piece of software I have ever used.
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